John Brown Russwurm (October 1, 1799 – June 9, 1851) was a Jamaican-born American abolitionist, newspaper publisher, and colonist of Liberia, where he moved from the United States.

As a child he traveled to the United States with his father and received a formal education, becoming the first black person to graduate from Hebron Academy and Bowdoin College.

As a young man, Russwurm moved from Portland, Maine, to New York City, where he was a founder with Samuel Cornish of the abolitionist newspaper Freedom's Journal, the first paper owned and operated by African Americans.

In 1812, father and son moved to Portland, Maine (then part of Massachusetts), where the elder Russwurm married widow Susan Blanchard in 1813.

The New York City of their day boasted the largest population of Blacks in any Northern city—an estimated 15,000, which was 10 percent of the 150,000 free "colored" people living in the North.

By the early 1800s, these free Blacks and escaped slaves, who lived in a segregated world, had developed their own churches, schools and clubs.

[8] On March 16 of that year, 27-year-old[9] Russwurm, along with his co-editor Samuel Cornish, published the first edition of Freedom's Journal, an abolitionist newspaper dedicated to opposition of slavery.

[10] During his tenure as editor, Russwurm regularly included material about ancient and modern African history, providing readers on both sides of the Atlantic with a curated source of information about the continent.

[11] When Cornish resigned from the paper in September 1827, Russwurm used his position to advocate for voluntary emigration of Black people from the United States to Africa.

Russwurm wanted to exercise power in the political arena, and felt that Liberia offered him that opportunity while the United States did not.

[3] In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante named John Brown Russwurm on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.