T. Thomas Fortune was considered the most distinguished black journalist of the late nineteenth century. He wrote for both black and white newspapers but gained his prominence chiefly as editor of the New York Age and its forerunners, the New York Globe and New York Freeman. Under him the Age became the leading black newspaper in the nation. In addition, Fortune was one of the few blacks to be a frequent contributor to major white newspapers, writing for the New York Sun and the Boston Transcript. In 1887, he advocated formation of the Afro-American League, a short-lived civil rights organization that predated the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League by about twenty years. During his journalistic career his political orientation changed from militant radicalism to conservatism influence by association with Booker T. Washington, for whom Fortune acted as a ghostwriter...