A recent invitation to speak on the life and legacy of Timothy Thomas Fortune was the perfect opportunity for my column. On several occasions, I have included Fortune in my commentaries and anthologies, and no matter where he’s included his worth and prestige are undeniably warranted.
Fortune was born into slavery on Oct. 3, 1856 in Mariana, Jackson County, Florida. His education began after his family, Emanuel and Sarah Jane Fortune, moved to Jacksonville, where he attended Edwin M. Stanton School. It is not clear how he managed to acquire the job as a page in the state senate and later as an apprentice printer of a state newspaper. But they may have come as a result of his father’s standing as a politician during the Reconstruction Era. A succession of newspaper jobs followed his introduction to the profession at the Mariana Courier and the Jacksonville Daily-Times Union.
While Fortune was mainly a journalist, he was also quite proficient as the author of numerous books and articles, to say nothing of the countless editorials.
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But the income from his writings had to be supplemented by a steady job and reasonable salary in order to pay the bills. By 1874, he was sustaining himself as mail route agent, and then worked as a customs inspector for the eastern district of Delaware. His tenure as an inspector was very brief and he was soon off to Howard University.
At the HBCU, the inveterate autodidact was admitted to the law school. But after a couple of semesters, he changed his major to journalism. This, too, was just temporary and he was soon off to work at the People’s Advocate in Washington D.C. It was during this stint that he married Carrie C. Smiley. His journeys next took him to New York City, and his journalistic occupation expanded considerably, most lucrative as an editor and publisher of the New York Globe, then The Freeman, and finally The New York Age. It was at the latter paper that his renown was full established, and the paper was widely circulated and praised as “The Afro-American Journal of News and Opinion.” In 1890, a proponent of militant agitation, Fortune was elected chairman of the executive committee of the National Afro-American Press Association (NAAPA) at their annual assembly in Indianapolis.
As he took on the leadership of the NAAPA, he still found the time and energy to co-edit the more militant publication, The National Afro-American League, and Fortune is often cited as the progenitor of the “Afro-American” designation. This work was short-lived, lasting only four years but was revived in Rochester, New York in 1898 and renamed The National Afro-American Council under the guidance of Alexander Walters. Later, Fortune would succeed Walters as president from 1902-1904. Interestingly, both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois were prominent members of the council, as well as the esteemed Ida B. Wells.
In several ways, the League and the Council were pacesetters for the later creation of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP. But Fortune’s real renown came from his co-ownership of the New York Age, which he shared with his brother Emanuel and Jerome Peterson. From the paper’s articles and editorials, it led the way against the KKK, lynching, racial discrimination and the various attacks on Black Americans. The paper was unflinching in its fight against white supremacy and the daily violence that went unchecked in the Black community.
After Ida B. Wells’ printing press was destroyed by a white mob in 1892, Fortune gave her a job and the platform to continue her crusade against lynching.
Fortune, an implacable Republican, volunteered to help on William McKinley’s 1900 presidential campaign, though he remained a bi-partisan critic of the corruption in both parties.
Fortune published his book “Dreams of Life: Miscellaneous Poems” in 1905. Two years later, he experienced a nervous breakdown and sold the Age to Fred R. Moore, who kept the paper operating until 1960. Meanwhile, Fortune continued writing and published his next book, “The New York Negro in Journalism,” in 1915.
When Marcus Garvey arrived in the U.S. in 1916 and put the UNIA on the map, Fortune was there for him as an editor of the organization’s organ, The Negro World. With a circulation of 200,000 in the states and elsewhere, it was the largest Black publication.
According to Tony Martin in his book “Literary Garveyism,” Fortune greeted Garvey’s poetry with enthusiasm, and “he saw Garvey as being uniquely qualified to write poetry. Only those who have suffered greatly or felt the ecstasies of joy in its highest and purest form, and capable of reaching the depths in poetic expression which affect and move great masses of people,” Fortune said of Garvey. During this same period, Fortune debated William Ferris on the relativity of miracles, concluding that the creation of the UNIA was a miracle and attributable to Garvey’s powers. Ferris was of the opinion that only the transformation of things by the deity could be properly defined as miraculous.
Six years later in 1928, Fortune died in Philadelphia. He was 71. He is buried at Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, PA. In 1976, his house in Red Bank, N.J. was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Find Out More
Practically every compendium on Black journalism has at least a citation on Fortune and his legacy, and there’s more from me on Fortune in this article: “The Black Press: A Long History of Service and Advocacy.” Crisis. Vol. 98, no. 3 (March 1991).
Discussion
See Tony Martin’s “Literary Garveyism” on Fortune’s journalism with the UNIA and The Negro World.
Place in Context
Born before the Civil War, Fortune lived to see the outcome of World War I, and the celebration of the New Negro Renaissance.
This Week in Black History
March 16, 1966: Rodney Peete, a NFL quarterback, was born in Mesa, Arizona.
March 17, 1919: Singer/pianist Nat King Cole was born in Montgomery, Ala. He died in 1965.
March 18, 1959: Actress/singer Irene Cara was born in the Bronx, NY. She died in 2022.