T. Thomas Fortune
| Timothy Thomas Fortune | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
October 3, 1856 Marianna, Florida, U.S. |
| Died | June 2, 1928 (aged 71) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Stanton High School for Negroes |
| Occupation | Orator, author, publisher, and African American civil rights leader |
| Political party | Republican |
Timothy Thomas Fortune (October 3, 1856 – June 2, 1928) was an orator, civil rights leader, journalist, writer, editor and publisher. He was the highly influential editor of the nation's leading black newspaper The New York Age and was the leading economist in the black community. He was a long-time adviser to Booker T. Washington and the ghost writer, and the editor of Washington's first autobiography, The Story of My Life and Work. Fortune’s philosophy of militant agitation on behalf of the rights of black people laid one of the foundations of the Civil Rights Movement.
He was born into slavery in Marianna, Jackson County, Florida, to Emanuel and Sarah Jane Fortune. He started his education at Marianna's first school for African Americans after the Civil War. His family moved to Jacksonville where he attended Stanton High School for Negroes. He worked both as a page in the state senate and as apprenticed printer at a Jacksonville newspaper during the time that his father, Emanuel, was a Reconstruction politician in Florida. At one time Fortune 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. In 1874 he was mail route agent and then he was promoted to customs inspector for the eastern district of Delaware but only held this position for a few months before resigning in order to attend Howard University.
Although he was mostly self-taught prior to his college enrollment in 1875, Fortune was admitted to study law. He changed his major 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. About that same time he married Carrie C. Smiley.
Fortune moved to New York City in 1879 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.
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