Timothy Thomas Fortune

Born a slave in Marianna, Florida, poet, editor, and journalist Timothy Thomas Fortune received less than three years of formal early education. He worked as a typesetter, Florida Senate page, and teacher before briefly studying law at Howard University.

In 1877 Fortune married Caroline Charlotte Smiley, and they went on to raise five children together. In 1879 he began what was to be a 50-year career in journalism, during which he worked as an editor, printer, and writer dedicated to African American rights. For over 20 years he was the editor of a newspaper first known as the New York Globe, then renamed the Freeman, and finally the New York Age, where he published the work of Ida B. Wells and other civil rights activists. In 1890 Fortune co-founded the National Afro-American League, one of the first civil rights organizations in the United States.

Fortune’s poetry, collected in Dreams of Life: Miscellaneous Poems (1905), often explores romantic love, pride, and racial injustice.

Fortune died in Philadelphia in 1928.