The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799-1851 - Softcover

James, Winston

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814742904 ISBN 13: 9780814742907

Publisher: NYU Press, 2010

Synopsis

“If I know my own heart, I can truly say, that I have not a selfish wish in placing myself under the patronage of the [American Colonization] Society; usefulness in my day and generation, is what I principally court.”
“Sensible then, as all are of the disadvantages under which we at present labour, can any consider it a mark of folly, for us to cast our eyes upon some other portion of the globe where all these inconveniences are removed where the Man of Colour freed from the fetters and prejudice, and degradation, under which he labours in this land, may walk forth in all the majesty of his creation—a new born creature—a Free Man!”
—John Brown Russwurm, 1829.
John Brown Russwurm (1799-1851) is almost completely missing from the annals of the Pan-African movement, despite the pioneering role he played as an educator, abolitionist, editor, government official, emigrationist and colonizationist. Russwurm’s life is one of “firsts”: first African American graduate of Maine’s Bowdoin College; co-founder of Freedom’s Journal, America’s first newspaper to be owned, operated, and edited by African Americans; and, following his emigration to Africa, first black governor of the Maryland section of Liberia. Despite his accomplishments, Russwurm struggled internally with the perennial Pan-Africanist dilemma of whether to go to Africa or stay and fight in the United States, and his ordeal was the first of its kind to be experienced and resolved before the public eye.
With this slim, accessible biography of Russwurm, Winston James makes a major contribution to the history of black uplift and protest in the Early American Republic and the larger Pan-African world. James supplements the biography with a carefully edited and annotated selection of Russwurm’s writings, which vividly demonstrate the trajectory of his political thinking and contribution to Pan-Africanist thought and highlight the challenges confronting the peoples of the African Diaspora. Though enormously rich and powerfully analytical, Russwurm’s writings have never been previously anthologized.
The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm is a unique and unparalleled reflection on the Early American Republic, the African Diaspora and the wider history of the times. An unblinking observer of and commentator on the condition of African Americans as well as a courageous fighter against white supremacy and for black emancipation, Russwurm’s life and writings provide a distinct and articulate voice on race that is as relevant to the present as it was to his own lifetime.

About this title

About the Author:

Winston James is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion; Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America, which won the Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship from the Caribbean Studies Association; and the co-editor of Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain.

Review:

"The discerning light that James focuses on Russwurm is a significant contribution to the literature of the antislavery movement" (H. Shapiro Choice Magazine)

"In this clearly written and widely researched biography Winston James has brought back from unwarranted historical obscurity the life and work of the Pan-Africanist, John Brown Russwurm, a pioneer in the struggle for freedom and equality in the US and Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century." (Richard Blackett,author of Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860)

"Winston James sensitive, probing, and absorbing portrait of John Brown Russwurm restores this pivotal but little-known activist to the prominent status he deserves. Editor, educator, abolitionist, colonizationist, Pan-African polemicistRusswurm assumed all of these roles in a life that stretched from the Caribbean to Canada and America to Africa. James' insightful book shows how he moved from place to place, and cause to cause, with seeming ease. The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm will delight and please both scholars and students of the Black Atlantic for some time to come." (Richard S. Newman,author of Freedoms Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers)

"This is the most authoritative scholarly introduction so far to the life of John Russwurm, that enigmatic founder of black nationalism, and the most accessible sampling of his works.  Professor James has performed a service to the profession." (Wilson J. Moses,author of The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925)

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0814742904
• ISBN 13: 9780814742907
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288