back to africa movements of Marcus Garvey and othersand to the ambiguity of origin implied by such terms as “Negro” an“Colord.”

“As an American citizen,” he wrote in Black and White (1884), “I feel it born in my nature to share in the fullest measure all that is american, feeling the full force of the fact that while we are classed as Africans, just as the Germans are classed, we are in all things American citizens, American

freemen.” Fortune was the leading black editor and journalist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. while often eclipsed in historical memory by the mythic duality of W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. washington, he is essential to a full understanding of black leadership after recon

struction.He grappled , above all, with the funddamental question of what it meant for a black A

sponsered by the Freedmens Bureau, and spent a year in a preratory program at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Fortune Left Florida in 1881 and settled in New York City, his home for the remainder of his life. After a brief stint workiing on a white owned newspaper, Fortune launched out on his own to found what would later become the New York Age. Fortune

correspond on and off with Washington, their relationship was never as close as it had been. Fortune’s last major work stands in rather jarring contrast to his past ideology; from 1923 until his death in 1928 he served as editor for theNegro World, the publication of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Assocition whose racial separatism and back-to-Africa program were antithetical to Fortune’s long held positions. But far from eraseing his life’s work, Fortune’s decline amounts to something of a tragic postscript that points both toward and away from the life that preceded it. Nevertheless, Fortune will be recalled as the father of African-American journalism and one of the first proponents of political organizations that

an outspoken advocate for racial equality, and presures from theKlan forced him to relocate his family to Jacksonville. Here Fortune began to cultivate his dual intrest in politics and journalism. He served as a page in the state Senate and learned the printers trade at various local newspapers. Fortune was largely an autodidact, although he briefly attended a school

by the time he sold his intrest in the Age to Fred R. Moore in 1907.Fortune lived for another two decades, but they were a bitter postscript to his vibrant public life of the decades before. The details of his life after1907 are vague:He bounced from paper to paper working as a correspondent and editorial writer for several ephemeral publications. And while he continued to

Washington, particularly regarding the education and economic development of the race. And Fortune insists that he had”nothing in with Dr.Washington, especially his his personal and political ones.” Like Du Bois, he questioned Washington’s conciliatory stance toward southern whites. In all,Fortune had the freedom, because of his reputation as a radical, to say things to which Washington would agree in private but could never in

would create and realize the gols of the modern civil rights movement. His analysis of the colonial exploitation of Africa was prophetic:1. Bloodshed and usurpations, the rum jug and the bible these will

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