Timothy Thomas Fortune (1856-1928) was one of the most prominent black journalists involved in the flourishing black press of the post-Civil War era.

Though not as well known today as many of his contemporaries, T. Thomas Fortune was the foremost African American journalist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using his editorial position at a series of black newspapers in New York City, Fortune established himself as a leading spokesman and defender of the rights of African Americans in both the South and the North.

Besides using his journalistic pulpit to demand equal economic opportunity for blacks and equal protection under the law, Fortune founded the Afro-American League, an equal rights organization that preceded the Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to extend this battle into the political arena. But his great hopes for the league never materialized, and...