ABSTRACT
Timothy Thomas Fortune was born of slave parents in Jackson County, Florida. After the Civil War the family moved to Jacksonville. During the Reconstruction, largely because of the political influence of his father, young Fortune was given several minor political positions. But in 1876 he left Florida and came to Howard University, where he remained for two years. Fortune worked on the People’s Advocate in Washington and after a year of school teaching in Florida came to New York in 1879. In 1880 with George Parker and William Walter Sampson he started the Rumor, which soon was changed to The New York Globe. The Globe continued until 1884, and in the same year Fortune became the sole proprietor and editor of the New York Freeman. The Freeman, under the joint ownership of Fortune and Peterson, changed its name to the New York Age, and from 1880 to 1907 Fortune established his career by writing for this paper. The Freeman, because of its format and the quality of its journalism, has been described as the most popular paper published among Afro-American journals, and Fortune himself as a “brilliant, aggressive editorial writer”. He has also been described as the leading Negro journalist before World War I.
