Timothy Thomas Fortune

• Timothy Fortune
• Born: October 3, 1856
• Died: June4, 1928

Black journalist, was born a slave in Marianna Township, Florida, one of several children of Emanuel Fortune and Sarah Jane Fortune. Emanuel Fortune was the son of an Irishman and a black woman who also claimed Jewish and Indian descent. Sarah Fortune had a Seminole father. Timothy Fortune was freed in 1865 and spent his youth in the maelstrom of Reconstruction. Later, he said, “The manchild Timothy came to life in a fierce storm of rain, thunder and lightning, and when the nation was agitated.” Emanuel Fortune became a successful shoemaker and a tanner as a freedman and was elected first as a delegate to the convention that redrafted the state constitution and then to the state legislature. He also became a target of the Ku Klux Klan.

Timothy Fortune attended a Freedman’s Bureau School, and worked as a printer’s devil for three newspapers, gaining valuable technical experience. In 1868 the family moved to Jacksonville to avoid white violence, and young Fortune became a page in the state senate, where he observed the “capable” black politicians and saw-corruption seep into the Republican party. After attending Staunton Institute, a black public school, and working as a mail route agent for a railroad, he became a special agent in 1875 for the Delaware district of the Treasury Department. Fortune enrolled in Howard University in 1876 but left because of financial need; he became a compositor on and contributor to the People’s Advocate, a black Washington, D. C. newspaper. The black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass was then living in the capital, and the two men became friends. In 1877 Fortune married Charlotte Caroline Smiley.

After a dispute with his employers Fortune spent two years teaching in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1880 he moved to New York City, joining a migration of blacks to the North. During a year as compositor with the Weekly Witness, a white newspaper, he began to feel a strong desire to found a black newspaper. With others, Fortune took over the failing Rumor in 1881, making it into a tabloid and calling it a “Representative Colored American Newspaper.” His Globe, established in 1882, was of regular size. Black publishers of this period, including Fortune, saw their goal as the obtaining of rights accorded to blacks in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The expansion of black literacy had created a larger audience for black papers. Ridiculed often by white editors, blacks also sought a better image through their press. Since Democrats were associated with white supremacy, the black press was Republican. Fortune, in particular, protested the enforced separation of blacks from the rest of society.

While starting his publishing career, Fortune also began to write Black and White (1884) on “land, labor and politics in the South.” Beset by financial difficulties, he lost The Globe; but he set up The New York Freeman in 1884 and this paper became The New York Age, which he left in 1887, again because of monetary problems. Then, as assistant editor of the white New York Evening Sun, he collaborated with Charles A. Dana. In 1891 he resumed editorship of the Age, criticizing school segregation in New York and demanding an “equal measure of the protection of the laws.” Fortune also called for the federal government to use force to insure black suffrage in the South.

As a youth, Fortune had noticed corruption in the Republican party; now, as a publisher and editor, he began to attack the “treachery” of the Republicans. In the 1880s he began to modify his support of Republicans, seeing the potential importance of a black swing vote that could not be taken for granted by either party. Wary of Grover Cleveland prior to the 1884 election, Fortune supported the Democratic president cautiously afterward, but eventually became disenchanted. His flirtation with the Democrats brought him into conflict with Douglass, who denounced “Negro Democrats” as “miserable tools” of the Southern Bourbons. By 1890 Fortune had once again become a supporter of the Republicans.

In his newspapers Fortune argued for self-help in the black community and acquired a slightly conservative reputation. He attacked inequality in the distribution of school funds in the South more than segregation itself. He was also concerned with the exploitation of labor by industrial and agricultural monopolies. The new “industrial slavery” in the South was as bad as “chattel slavery” had been before emancipation, he argued. In Black and White, he advocated a single-tax program similiar to that of Henry George.

In 1890 Fortune proposed an Afro-American League, with the slogan “Let the whole race be moved as by one impulse.” The league held its first convention that year, with Fortune as temporary chairman; he later became secretary. Organized to oppose lynching and discrimination in schools, polling places, and public accommodations, the league was a forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In June 1890, six months after the founding of the league, Fortune was ejected from Trainor’s Hotel in New York City after his request for accommodations was refused. The league used political pressure, legal action, and publication to advance its aims, but its program did not arouse wide support. Fortune traveled widely to gain backing for the league in the South and Midwest and became its president in 1891. Financial difficulties caused the demise of the league in 1893. Fortune briefly became president of its successor, the Afro-American Council, in 1902.

Fortune stressed self-pride and self-respect among blacks in the 1890s, asserting that “those who will not help themselves are usually not helped by others.” He criticized the movement for colonization to Africa as degrading and favored intermarriage and other kinds of absorption into white society. He was among those who proposed the National Negro Business League, established in 1900 by Booker T. Washington as a focus for new, upwardly mobile middle-class tendencies in the black community. Fortune was chairman of the league’s executive committee from 1900 to 1909; he had also been chairman of the executive committee of the National Afro-American Press Association in 1890, and he helped found the Young Men’s Industrial League in 1885. During this period he gained a reputation for heavy drinking.

Common interest in industrial education helped to cement Fortune’s friendship with Washington. A leader in the work of the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions of Negroes in New York City, which was established in 1906, Fortune stressed the importance of education in the “purely breadwinning occupations.” He sought an economic base to compel political attention to blacks, lecturing often at Washington’s Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, helping to edit Washington’s books, and making recommendations for presidential appointments through Washington.

Fortune defended Washington against charges of accommodation to whites, although he criticized his friend privately for being too moderate during the Atlanta riots of 1906. In a financial and emotional crisis, Fortune lost the Age in 1907.

By 1910 Fortune had stopped drinking, and from 1909 to 1912 he was associate editor of The Philadelphia Tribune; in 1910 he became also an editor of The Amsterdam News in New York City. Moving to Washington, D. C. in 1914, he started the Sun, which soon folded, and later, for a brief period, he edited The Norfolk Journal and Guide in Virginia and The Colored American Review. In 1917 Fortune became secretary of the Negro Welfare Bureau of New Jersey, which resettled blacks migrating from the South.

Although Fortune had earlier opposed colonization, in 1923 he began to edit The Negro World, organ of the pro-colonization movement led by Marcus Garvey, who exercised ultimate control over the newspaper. Fortune was seemingly swayed from his earlier views by the apparent opportunity to fuse protest with values of pride, self-help, and achievement. As editor, he stressed the material advance of blacks.

Fortune was involved in many of the basic organizational and intellectual developments in the evolution of black identity, protest, and reform movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He died at the age of seventy-one. On his death The Amsterdam News reported that “New York has lost the greatest Negro leader it ever had.”

Fortune’s newspapers are the most important sources on his work, but copies of The New York Age for 1892-1905 are apparently no longer publicly available. A Fortune scrap-book of newspaper clippings has been compiled by the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library. See also Fortune’s articles in The A. M. E. Church Review, 1891-1917, and his books The Kind of Education an Afro-American Most Needs (1898), The Negro in Politics (1886), and Dreams of Life, Miscellaneous Poems (1905). The Booker T. Washington Papers in the Library of Congress, contain much Fortune correspondence. Biographical material includes E. L. Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune, Militar.: Journalist (1972); A. T. Slocum, “Timothy Thomas Fortune: A Negro in American Society,” senior thesis, Princeton University (1967); L. W. Werner, “The New York Age,” Crisis March 1938; A. Meier, Negro Thought in America. 1880-1915 (1963).