Samuel Eli Cornish: Editor of the First Black Newspaper in the United States
By Jessica R Clark | This article was originally published in Volume 19 of Black Voices. | Estimated reading time: 1:05
Samuel Eli Cornish was born in 1795 to free parents of mixed race and lived in the vicinity of Georgetown in Sussex County. A journalist, he was also an ordained Presbyterian minister, abolitionist, and publisher.
In 1815, he moved to Philadelphia which had a large community of free Blacks. In 1827, he became one of two editors of Freedom’s Journal, the first Black newspaper in the United States, intending to serve the 300,000 free Blacks in the country and especially New York’s community, as well as to offset the racist commentary of local papers in the city.
Ordained in 1822, his church, was established as the New Demeter Street Presbyterian Church, the first Black Presbyterian congregation in New York City.
In 1833 he was a founding member of the interracial American Anti-Slavery Society, an abolitionist society in the United States, along with William Lloyd Garrison, an American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer and Arthur Tappan, an American businessman, philanthropist and abolitionist.
He was active in the American Anti-Slavery Society until 1840 and reportedly left to join the newly formed American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society due to disputes with William Lloyd Garrison over religion in the Abolitionist movement and whether women could participate in abolitionist organizations. The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society held, first, that feminism had diverted attention from the abolitionist cause, and, second, derivative topics on gender and sexuality should remain distinct from that cause.
Cornish became a leader in the New York City’s small free Black community and died in 1858 in Brooklyn
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