We Wish to Plead Our Own Cause

The first trust-claim of a positioned, oppositional press in America.

“We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” The first sentence of the first issue, printed at 5 Varick Street in Lower Manhattan on March 16, 1827. The first African American-owned newspaper in the United States, founded by Samuel Cornish and Jamaican-born John Russwurm, first Black graduate of Bowdoin.

The trust claim was proximity to the people the white abolitionist press claimed to represent. Not detachment. Alignment. Pages carried foreign and domestic news alongside biographies of Black figures, school listings, housing notices, wedding announcements - the first time Black Americans appeared in a newspaper for reasons other than crime.

The fragility was structural. When Russwurm pivoted toward the American Colonization Society’s Liberian emigration agenda in 1828, he broke the alignment with his readers. The paper folded in March 1829 after 103 issues. The artifact proves that in the oppositional press, alignment with the community was the only currency that mattered.

Sources: blackpast.org ↗maap.columbia.edu ↗commons.wikimedia.org ↗