"We are African in origin and American in birth." -- Timothy Thomas Fortune
Timothy Thomas Fortune (October 3, 1856 – June 2, 1928) was an orator, civil rights leader, journalist, writer, editor and publisher. He was born during slavery in Marianna, Jackson County, Florida to Emanuel and Sarah Jane Fortune.
"I do not inveigh against higher education, I simply maintain that the sort of education the colored people of the South stand most in need of, is elementary and industrial. They should be instructed for the work to be done.""It is not safe in the republican form of government that clannishness should exist either by compulsory or voluntary reason. It is not good for the government and it is not good for the individual.""Men may be spoiled by education, even as they are spoiled by illiteracy. Education is the preparation of the mind for future work, hence men should be educated with special reference to the work.""Mob law is the most forcible expression of an abnormal public opinion; it shows that society is rotten to the core.""The colored man is in the South to stay there. He will not leave it voluntarily and he cannot be driven out. He had no voice in being carried into the South, but he will have a very loud voice in any attempt to put him out.""The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness."
Fortune started his education at Marianna's first school for African Americans after the Civil War. He worked both as a page in the state senate and apprenticed as printer at a Jacksonville newspaper during the time that his father, Emanuel, was a Reconstruction politician in Florida. At one time he also worked at the Marianna Courier and later the Jacksonville Daily-Times Union. These experiences would be the start of a career wherein he would go on to have his work published in over twenty books and articles and in more than three hundred editorials.
Although he was mostly self-taught, in 1875 Fortune enrolled in Howard University to study law. He changed 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.
Fortune moved to New York City in 1881 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.
Upon arrival in New York, Fortune began working as a printer. He became part owner of various publications, ultimately founding the New York Freeman in 1884. That same year he published a book Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South. Four years later The Freeman took the new name of "The New York Age" and set out to become "The Afro-American Journal of News and Opinion".
In Chicago on January 25, 1890 Fortune co-founded the militant National Afro-American League to right wrongs against African Americans authorized by law and sanctioned or tolerated by public opinion. The league fell apart after four years. When it was revived in Rochester, New York on September 15, 1898, it had the new name of the "National Afro-American Council", with Fortune as President. Those two organizations would play 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.
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 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. 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. He published 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. Fortune published another book The New York Negro in Journalism in 1915.
Fortune went to work as an editor at the UNIA's house organ, the Negro World, in 1923. At its height the Negro World had circulation of over 200,000. With distribution throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and in Central America it may have been the most widely distributed newspaper in the world at that time. During his tenure at the Negro World, Fortune rubbed shoulders with such literary luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston, W.A. Domingo, Hubert Harrison, and John E. Bruce, among others.
Fortune moved to Red Bank, New Jersey in 1901, where he built his home, Maple Hill. 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 age 71 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
