Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper. By Jacqueline Bacon. (Lanham: Lexington, 2007. x, 325 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-1893-1. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-7391-1894-8.)

Abstract

Jacqueline Bacon begins the first chapter of this important study by quoting from Freedom's Journal's famous opening editorial, in which the editors Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm observed that for too long African Americans had been subjected to misrepresentations, degrading characterizations, and either limited benevolence or outright malevolence. Freedom's Journal was an attempt to refute such representations, to establish a more accurate record of African American life, and to claim the advantages, as Bacon notes, of “unprecedented access to public debates” (p. 13). Scholars have long understood the value of Freedom's Journal as a record of African American intellectual, cultural, and political history, but no one has yet studied in such detail the newspaper's history. In its short life (1827–1829), Freedom's Journal was not only a source for African American history but in many ways its organizing platform, the means by which a developing community, often referred to at the time as “a scattered people,” gathered together its historical, ideological, and moral fragments to announce itself as an active, self-determining force.