Reflecting on the Life and Legacy of T. Thomas Fortune
I began my work on CivicStory’s piece about the T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center in Red Bank with a question: If this Fortune guy is so important, how come I’ve never heard of him?
I’m not a trained scholar, but I went to good schools, specialized in humanities disciplines, read the newspaper regularly, and like to believe I have a decent familiarity with American history and culture. I know at least a little bit about the lives and accomplishments of important pre-21st-century Black Americans, from Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X and Shirley Chisholm. But as far as I could recall, the name of T. Thomas Fortune had never appeared on the syllabus of a class I’d taken or turned up in the pages of an article I was reading. How had this once-prominent Black journalist and advocate, a man who had worked closely with some of the leading Black writers and activists of the early 20th century, fallen into such obscurity less than a century after his death?
The answer, according to the academics I interviewed, was multidimensional: In his own time, Fortune’s complicated personal and professional life alienated him from one-time allies, and in the anti-Communist climate of succeeding decades, the radicalism of his economic views made him an uncongenial research subject.
But the disappearance of Fortune’s legacy also reflects something broader, I learned. “The field of professional history doesn't take any kind of Black history seriously until, really, the civil rights movement,” Walter D. Greason, a history professor at Macalester College in Minnesota, told me. “It's not just a willful forgetting; it's never taught.”
And even as the Red Bank cultural center does its part to rescue the memory of one important figure, the struggle continues elsewhere.
“African American history remains a deeply embattled subject,” says Seth Moglen, a Lehigh University professor of English, American studies and Africana studies. Conflicts in Florida over both the state’s standards for teaching Black history and the College Board’s new Advanced Placement course on African American studies show “the lengths to which many people in the United States are willing to go in order to try to bury the history of slavery and the forms of inequality that have followed from it,” Moglen says. “In a society with a very powerful history of racism, it remains very, very difficult to make the fullness of African American history visible.”
For me, the story of the T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center—a piece of Black history preserved through the efforts of a multiracial, grassroots community coalition—provides a hopeful counterpoint to the discouraging accounts of racial and political polarization that so often clog our newsfeeds. It’s proof that Americans can still find common ground, and a reminder that our past holds plenty of forgotten heroes waiting to be rediscovered.
Deborah Yaffe is a freelance writer based in Princeton Junction, N.J. She worked as a newspaper reporter in New Jersey and California for 14 years and is the author of two books: “Other People’s Children: The Battle for Justice and Equality in New Jersey’s Schools” (Rivergate Books, 2007) and “Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom” (Mariner Books, 2013).
This article is the first of CivicStory’s Humanities Reporter series, funded in part by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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