George W. Forbes
| George W. Forbes | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
George Washington Forbes 1864 Shannon, Mississippi |
| Died | March 10, 1927 South End, Boston |
| Resting place | Cedar Grove Cemetery |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Amherst College |
| Occupation | Librarian |
| Known for | Journalism, civil rights activism |
George W. Forbes (1864-1927) was an American journalist who advocated for African-American civil rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best known for co-founding the Boston Guardian, an African-American newspaper in which he and William Monroe Trotter published editorials excoriating Booker T. Washington for his accommodationist approach to race relations. He also founded and edited the Boston Courant, one of Boston's earliest black newspapers, and edited the A. M. E. Church Review, a national publication.
Forbes was born to slave parents in Mississippi, worked as a laborer at Harvard University, and graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts before gaining a national reputation as a journalist. Locally, he was well known as the reference librarian at the West End branch of the Boston Public Library, where he worked for 32 years. He was the Boston system's first black librarian.
Forbes was born to slave parents in Shannon, Mississippi, in 1864. In his youth he worked as a laborer and a farm hand. At the age of 14 he left Mississippi for Ohio, where he studied for a time at Wilberforce University. In the mid-1880s he moved to Boston, where he worked for three or four years as a laborer at Harvard University, and saved up to continue his education. While living in Boston he befriended W.E.B. Du Bois, who was studying at Harvard at the time, and who went on to become one of the most influential African-American leaders of the period.
In 1888, Forbes enrolled in Amherst College in western Massachusetts, where he made two lifelong friends: William H. Lewis, a pioneering black athlete who became an assistant U.S. attorney general, and William T. Jackson, who became an influential educator. Du Bois attended their graduation ceremony in 1892.
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