Junior editor John B. Russwurm was born in 1799 to an enslaved Black woman and a White American merchant in Port Antonia, Jamaica. His father, considering his son to be a free citizen, enrolled young Russwurm in a Canadian boarding school in Montreal. His father would later move to Portland, Maine and remarry a White woman, Susan Blanchard, who saw step-son Russwurm as a full part of her family. After his father's death in 1815, Blanchard ensured that Russwurm would complete his secondary education at Hebron Academy in Maine. When Susan Blanchard remarried, both she and her new husband oversaw Russwurm's admission to Bowdoin College in 1824. There, John B. Russwurm became the second known African American to earn a bachelor's degree from a U.S. university.