Renowned Editor and Activist Led Post-Reconstruction Struggle for Civil Rights

In Red Bank, the house where T. Thomas Fortune—one of America's most influential editors and journalists—resided between 1901 and 1911, has been preserved and repurposed as the T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center. One of two National Historic Landmarks in New Jersey honoring African American history, the center celebrates the life and works of Fortune, who galvanized the black press and early struggles for civil  liberties.

In 1890, Fortune delivered a powerful speech at the official launch of the National Afro-American League - the first Black civil rights organization in the United States:  

“… A million voters are practically disfranchised, have no representation in Federal or State legislature; and we are told by the supreme court of the land that the government which made the citizen and conferred co-equal rights upon him has no power to protect him… If it be true that the power which can create has no power to protect the creature, then it is high time that it secure to itself the necessary power.”

One hundred and forty-one delegates representing twenty-three states had gathered in Chicago to advocate for the rights of African-Americans, particularly the right to vote, which had been severely curtailed in Southern states by the end of the Reconstruction Era.   In speeches and in print, Fortune railed against the federal government’s inability to guarantee the freedoms and voting privileges that had been codified during his childhood in the 13th, 14th, and 15th constitutional amendments. 

Born into slavery in Marianna, Florida, Fortune was just seven years old when President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963.   Within two years, the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified.  In 1865, the Freedman’s Bureau (Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) was established by Congress to help 4 million newly emancipated men, women, and children. The bureau assisted in the creation of thousands of schools in a region where the education of slaves had been illegal, and Fortune could now enroll at Marianna’s first school for African-Americans.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 during President Andrew Johnson's administration, defined U.S. citizenship and declared equal rights for all citizens. This amendment paved the way for African-Americans to pursue and ultimately win elections for seats in state and federal government.  Yet systemic violence and terrorism toward blacks throughout the South kept freedom and justice brutally far away from reality.  

To escape such attacks, Fortune and his family had fled from Marianna and moved to Jacksonville, where his father, Emanuel, became involved in politics and was elected to the Florida House of Representatives. As a teenager, T. Thomas Fortune worked as a page in the Florida senate and became an apprentice at the local Jacksonville Daily-Times Union, sparking his life-long interest in journalism.

On February 3, 1870, the 15th constitutional amendment was ratified, granting Black men the right to vote. This third and final "Reconstruction Amendment" encouraged more African-Americans to run for and serve in government office.   As historian and author Eric Foner writes in “Rooted in Reconstruction: The First Wave of Black Congressmen”: “By 1877, when Reconstruction ended, my estimate is that about 2,000 black men held some official position....There were other important figures—political organizers, newspaper editors—but these were people who actually held public office.” 

A prominent example is Hiram R. Revels, the first African-American member of the U.S. Congress. One of sixteen Black men to serve in Congress between 1870 and 1877, Revels represented the state of Mississippi and was seated in the US Senate on February 25, 1870.    

By the time of Fortune's 1890 address to the National Afro-American League, pro-segregation Democratic Party members held the majorities in southern state legislatures; state constitutions were revised, and poll taxes enacted that suppressed black voter registration and voting.  Twenty years after the passage of the 15th Amendment, Fortune's dramatic recounting of history demanded accountability from the U.S. government:  

“Fellow members of the League, it is matter of history that the abolition of slavery was the fruit of the fiercest and most protracted agitation in the history of social reforms… When emancipation was an established fact, when the slave had been made a freeman and the freeman had been made a citizen, the Nation reached the conclusion that its duty was fully discharged.    A reaction set in after the second election of Gen. Grant to the presidency in 1872, and terminated after the election of Mr. Hayes in 1876, when the Afro American citizen was turned over to the tender mercies of his late masters, deserted by the Nation, deserted by the party he had served in peace and in war [?]… Ladies and gentlemen, we have been robbed of the honest wages of our toil; we have been robbed of the substance of our citizenship by murder and intimidation…”

The speech was printed and widely read in The New York Age, a publication that gained enormous influence under Fortune's direction. (After studying law at Howard University in DC, Fortune had eventually moved to New York with his young family.)  He worked as editor and co-owner of The New York Age for twenty years, during which time the paper became known for quality journalism and editorials condemning racism, lynching and disenfranchisement. Fortune also published a book entitled, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South in 1884, and went on write some 300 editorials and that appeared in more than twenty books.

T. Thomas Fortune often spoke about agitation as a pathway toward equality in the United States. His call for African Americans to claim their rights as citizens foreshadowed the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s:

“The aspirations of the human soul, like the climbing vine, are forever in the line of greater freedom, fuller knowledge, ampler possessions. These aspirations find always opposing aspirations. It is true of nations seeking after greater reforms. To accomplish these, agitation is necessary.”

Fortune’s vivid words and courageous writings inspire us and ring true today.   

Two upcoming T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center events:

Sun Feb 23, 1 to 3 pm - An African American Cultural Experience - Soul food, music, and more - Lunch Break, 121 Drs. James Parker Blvd., Red Bank

Thurs Feb 27, 6 to 8 pm - Book Club: Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson; discussion and refreshments; Two-River Theater, 21 Bridge Ave., Red Bank

The T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center preserves the house where Fortune and his family once resided. The home, which Fortune called "Red Maple," is a national historic landmark, and was designated a "national historic site in journalism" last fall.  

The center’s commemorative events throughout February, celebrate Black History Month, an annual tradition since 1970 that evolved from the first Negro History Week in 1926 spearheaded by Dr. Carter G. Woodson.  As a historian, Woodson aimed to counter the underrepresentation of African Americans in traditional studies of American history.

This year’s Black History Month theme, “African Americans and the vote” highlights three significant anniversaries: 150 years since the passage of the 15th Amendment on February 3, 1870; 100 years since the ratification of the 19th Amendment granting women’s suffrage; and fifty-five years since the passage of the Voting Rights Act by Congress in 1965, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.