Lovett Fort-Whiteman

Lovett Fort-Whiteman
Fort-Whiteman at the founding of the ANLC, 1925.
Born	December 1894 Dallas, Texas, USA
Died	January 13, 1939 Kolyma, Siberia, USSR
Cause of death	Malnutrition-related disease
Nationality	American
Occupation	Political activist, Comintern functionary

Lovett Huey Fort-Whiteman (1894–1939) was an American political activist and Communist International functionary. The first black American to attend a Comintern training school in the Soviet Union in 1924, Fort-Whiteman was later named the first national organizer of the American Negro Labor Congress, a mass organization (front group) of the Communist Party, USA. Fort-Whiteman, once called "the reddest of the blacks" by Time magazine, is perhaps best remembered as an American-born victim of the Soviet secret police terror of 1937-1938, dying in a Siberian forced labor camp early in 1939.

Lovett Huey Fort-Whiteman was born in Dallas, Texas in December 1894. His father, Moses Whiteman, was born into slavery in South Carolina and relocated to Texas at some time prior to 1887, where he worked as a janitor and a small scale cattle rancher. At the age of 35, Moses Whiteman married the 15-year-old Elizabeth Fort. Lovett was the first of the couple's children.

Fort-Whiteman received a better education than was common for many African-American children of the era in the Dallas public schools, attending one of the few high schools in the American South in that day open to black attendance. Following graduation from high school, Fort-Whiteman enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, probably about 1906, from which he graduated as a machinist.

Following completion of his studies at Tuskegee, Fort-Whiteman gained admission to Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, with a view to becoming a medical doctor, but he did not complete the course of studies at that institution.

By 1910, his father having died, Fort-Whiteman had moved with his mother and younger sister to the Harlem area of New York City, where he worked as a hotel bellman to support the family while harboring dreams of becoming a professional actor.