Born into slavery, T. Thomas Fortune was known as the dean of African American journalism by the time of his death in the early twentieth century. The editorship of three prominent black newspapers--the New York Globe, New York Freeman, and New York Age--provided Fortune with a platform to speak against racism and injustice.For nearly five decades his was one of the most powerful voices in the press. Contemporaries such as Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington considered him an equal, if not a superior, in social and political thought. Today's histories often...

The Negro Problem is a collection of six historic essays on the state of race relations during the Reconstruction and early twentieth century. Written from the African American point of view these essays show how far race relations have progressed, and how far we have yet to go. Included are: Industrial Education for the Negro by Booker T. Washington The Talented Tenth by W.E. Burghardt DuBois The Disfranchisement of the Negro by Charles W. Chesnutt The Negro and the Law by Wilford H. Smith The Characteristics of the Negro People by H.T. Kealing Representative American Negroes by Paul...

T. Thomas Fortune was a leading African American publisher, editor, and journalist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who was born a slave in antebellum Florida lived through emancipation, and rose to become a literary lion of his generation. In "T. Thomas Fortune's After War Times, " Daniel R. Weinfeld brings together a series of twenty-three autobiographical articles Fortune wrote about his formative childhood during Reconstruction and subsequent move to Washington, DC.
By 1890 Fortune had founded a predecessor organization to the National Association for the...