Timothy Thomas Fortune (October 3, 1856June 2, 1928) was an American orator, civil rights leader, journalist, writer, editor and publisher. He was the highly influential editor of the nation's leading black newspaper The New York Age and was the leading economist in the black community. He was a long-time adviser and friend to Booker T. Washington and was the editor of Washington's first autobiography, The Story of My Life and Work. Fortune's philosophy of militant agitation on behalf of the rights of black people laid one of the foundations of the Civil Rights Movement.

Early life

Timothy Thomas Fortune was born into slavery in Marianna, Jackson County, Florida, to Emanuel Fortune and Sarah Jane Fortune, and started his education at Marianna's first school for African Americans after the Civil War. His family moved to Jacksonville, where he attended Edwin M. Stanton School (predecessor of Stanton College Preparatory School) He worked both as a page in the state senate and as apprentice printer at a Jacksonville newspaper during the time that his father, Emanuel, was a Reconstruction politician in Florida. At one time Fortune also worked at the Marianna Courier and later the Jacksonville Daily-Times Union. These experiences would be the start of a career in which his work was published in more than twenty books and articles and in more than three hundred editorials. In 1872 he was mail route agent and then he was promoted to customs inspector for the eastern district of Delaware but only held this position for a few months before resigning in order to attend Howard University.

Although he was mostly self-taught prior to his college enrollment in 1874, Fortune was admitted to study law. He changed his major to journalism after two semesters before leaving school altogether to begin work, in 1876, at the People's Advocate, a newspaper in Washington, D.C. On February 21, 1878, Fortune married Carrie C. Smiley (née Caroline Charlotte Smiley; 1860–1940) in Washington, D.C.

New York journalist

Fortune moved to New York City in 1879 and began a process whereby over the next two decades he would become known as editor and owner of a newspaper named first the Globe, then the Freeman, and finally the New York Age. and one week later, on November 22, Fortune published the first issue of his New York Freeman. In the late 1880s, he was considered the greatest black newspaper writer in America. The League and the council had a vital role in setting the stage for the Niagara Movement, NAACP, and other civil rights organizations to follow. Fortune was also the leading advocate of using "Afro-American" to identify his people. Since they are "African in origin and American in birth", it was his argument that it most accurately defined them.

The relationship between Booker T. Washington and Fortune changed over time. For example, Fortune was a trusted advisor to Washington. Fortune was also a ghost writer and editor for Washington and helped with Washington's autobigraphy The Story of My Life and Work (1900). Fortune and Washington were often in disagreement regarding their politics. Fortune criticized Washington for being too moderate and oriented to cautious reform. Washington was a staunch opponent to any ideas of armed resistance. In Washington's The Case of the Negro (1899) he calls out "impatient extremists among the Negroes in the North" as he believed they were hurting black people as a whole and misguiding southern blacks. Scholars believe Washington likely was talking about Fortune and other radical activists.

With Fortune at the helm as co-owner with Emanuel Fortune Jr. and Jerome B. Peterson, the New York Age became the most widely read of all Black newspapers. It stood at the forefront as a voice agitating against the evils of discrimination, lynching, mob violence, and disenfranchisement. Its popularity was due in part to Fortune's editorials, which condemned all forms of discrimination and demanded full justice for all African Americans. Ida B. Wells's newspaper Memphis Free Speech and Headlight had its printing press destroyed and building burned as the result of an article published in it on May 25, 1892. The perpetrators of this attack were a white mob that threatened to harm Wells if she ever returned to Memphis. Fortune then gave her a job and a new platform from which to detail and condemn lynching. His book The Kind of Education the Afro-American Most Needs was published in 1898, and Dreams of Life: Miscellaneous Poems in 1905. After a nervous breakdown, Fortune sold the New York Age to Fred R. Moore in 1907, who continued publishing it until 1960. Booker T. Washington supported this sale and ended his friendship with Fortune. Fortune published another book, The New York Negro in Journalism, in 1915.

In the 1900 presidential election he campaigned for William McKinley, and he was politically active in the Republican Party. Fortune was the editor at the Negro World until he died in 1928.

Later life

Fortune moved to Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1901, where he built his home, Maple Hall. The house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 8, 1976, and the New Jersey Register of Historic Places on August 16, 1979.

Fortune died in 1928 at the age of 71 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and is interred at Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Pennsylvania.

References

Sources

  • Curry, Tommy J. "The Fortune of Wells: Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Use of T. Thomas Fortune’s Philosophy of Social Agitation as a Prolegomenon to Militant Civil Rights Activism," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy (2012), 48#4, pp. 457–82 in Project MUSE
  • Ph.D, Walter Greason (2007-01-19). "T. Thomas Fortune (1856-1928)". BlackPast.org. Retrieved 2025-10-22.
  • Boyd, Herb (2025-03-20). "T. Thomas Fortune, an accomplished journalist and prolific author". New York Amsterdam News. Retrieved 2025-11-05.
  • Brown, Nikki L. M. (2020). Pinder, Sherrow O. (ed.). Black political thought from David Walker to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 62–67. ISBN 978-1-316-64899-5.
  • Fortune, Timothy Thomas (2020). Pinder, Sherrow O. (ed.). Black political thought from David Walker to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 83–91. ISBN 978-1-316-64899-5.
  • Washington, Booker T. (2020). Pinder, Sherrow O. (ed.). Black political thought from David Walker to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 92–105. ISBN 978-1-316-64899-5.
  • "Timothy Thomas Fortune: An American Agitator Looks for a Cold Beer in Manhattan". The Gotham Center for New York City History. 2016-02-11. Retrieved 2025-10-27.
  • "Hayes Historical Journal: T. Thomas Fortune". Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums. Retrieved 2025-10-27.
  • Nelson, Claudia D. "The Men that Influenced Ida B. Wells-Barnett: Jim Wells, T. Thomas Fortune, and Frederick Douglass," Making Connections: A Journal for Teachers of Cultural Diversity (2006), 10#1, pp. 25–44.
  • Thornbrough, Emma Lou. T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist (1972), the standard scholarly biography

Primary sources

  • Alexander, Shawn, ed. T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880-1928 (2010)
  • Soldiers without Swords Biographies
  • Tuskegee's point-man, Timothy Fortune
  • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
  • The Reader's Companion to American History
  • T. Thomas Fortune House
  • Letter from T. Thomas Fortune to George Myers
  • After Reconstruction: Problems of African Americans in the South
  • An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP