Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [440]
Influential white Presbyterian clergymen were upset by Cornish’s denunciations of the American Colonization Society and by what they deemed his insufficient appreciation for their altruism. This created an awkward situation at a time when Cornish was visiting white churches to solicit funds for First Colored Presbyterian. In September 1827, therefore, having completed his agreed-upon six months, Cornish resigned as editor and accepted instead a position as agent of the African Free Schools. (Working with black women who formed the African Dorcas Association in 1828, he managed to double pupil enrollment in a few years by opening four new schools nearer the black community and by mending and providing clothes for children to go to class in.)
John Russwurm, left, and the Rev. Samuel Cornish with the masthead of Freedom’s Journal— the first African-American newspaper in the United States, famous for its pioneering, no-holds-barred attacks on both slavery and racism. (Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
In 1828 Cornish also withdrew as pastor of First Colored Presbyterian and was succeeded by Theodore Wright. Born in 1797 in New Jersey—his father was from Madagascar—Wright had attended the African Free School and in 1825 been admitted to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he served as one of Freedom’s Journal’s fifteen agents, getting many students and faculty to subscribe. On graduating in 1828—the first Afro-American alumnus of a theological seminary—Wright was engaged by the Presbytery of New York. He rapidly expanded First Colored Presbyterian’s membership, was installed in 1830 as its pastor, and would go on to transform a small struggling institution into the second largest black church in the city, one heavily involved in educational, reform, and protest efforts.
Freedom’s Journal, meanwhile, had fared poorly under Russwurm’s sole control. The young man had been won over to the support of the American Colonization Society, and he began printing articles (usually by whites) in favor of colonization, though still including articles (usually by blacks) opposing it. Finally, on March 28, 1829, repudiated by his community, Russwurm resigned; the ACS sent him to Liberia as superintendent of public schools, and the paper ceased publication. Cornish started a new one to replace it, but the Rights of All lasted only a few months, and for much of the next decade, the black community’s newfound voice fell silent.
“CRUSH THIS HYDRA IN THE RUD”
Before doing so, however, it had won some powerful converts. Editor Samuel Cornish’s anticolonization broadsides had unsettled Arthur Tappan. So had the staunch opposition of Peter Williams Jr., rector of St. Philip’s, who in an Independence Day speech in 1830 pointedly evoked anti-immigrant sympathies by noting: “We are natives of this country, we ask only to be treated as well as foreigners.”
White evangelicals could hear the black antislavery ministers in part because they felt quite comfortable with them. They shared religious values, after all, as well as a belief in temperance and self-improvement. In 1833, for example, the Revs. Cornish and Wright founded the Phoenix Society of New York, declaring that the condition of “people of colour” could “only be meliorated by their being improved in morals, litera-ture, and the mechanic arts.” Such acceptance of the need to refine, educate, and employ New York’s African Americans appealed to Tappan, who signed on as treasurer and donated the funds to