“Dear Mr. Washington: Your letter of the 29th ult. dated at Dekalb, Illinois, was received, and am very glad to hear from you as I had begun to get a shade uneasy over your silence. I agree with you that some good may result from our Boston Campaign. From all I can hear from there a very healthy counter sentiment was created. Councilor Isaac Allen was in here Monday and he took that view of it and numbers of others…”- “T. Thomas Fortune to Booker T. Washington,” New York, February 1, 1899
Despite his cantankerous relationship with Fortune during his adult career when Fortune became a staunch supporter for Du Bois’s future nemesis, Booker T. Washington, Du Bois possessed a profound admiration for Fortune and the role he played in advancing his career. He expressed as much in the May 1907 Horizon (a periodical Du Bois edited briefly before he became founding editor of Crisis magazine in 1910) when recalling this brief tenure with Fortune’s paper:
“I remember my first knowing of the man. It was about 1883, while I was a lad in the High School. I became an agent for his paper and wrote crude little news notes from our town. He wrote me an encouraging letter-a good long sympathetic letter. That letter I shall not forget. No matter how far the writer has fallen and groveled in the dust [referring to his support of Washington] I shall ever remember that hand of help. His fierce brave voice made men of the nation hearken even while it scared them.”
When Fortune arrived as a young man in New York around 1880, he began working in the printer’s trade for John Dougall’s Weekly Witness, a religious paper. Shortly thereafter, he met regularly with a group of African American men whose intellectual interests were similar to his own. One of these was George Parker who had recently begun a “little weekly tabloid” entitled The Rumor. Fortune along with Walter Sampson, who helped secure Fortune’s job at the Weekly Witness, “wrote copy and set type for Rumor at night” while still working for Dougall’s paper in the day. After about a year, Fortune was quickly recognized as the far superior writer and editor to either Parker or Sampson. During this same period, Parker’s tabloid came under financial pressure, which allowed Fortune to become a partner. As partner, he then insisted upon changing the paper’s name from Rumor to New York Globe in July 1881.
The New York Globe continued operating under the joint partnership of Fortune and Parker, and “in three short years the Globe had won national recognition and its editor had gained the reputation of the most brilliant, fearless and uncompromising journalist of his race.” However, Fortune never formally secured legal proprietorship, and, after the paper was besieged by turmoil, Parker mortgaged the paper without Fortune’s knowledge. Shortly thereafter, Fortune was able to reverse his circumstances, and, in 1884, New York Globe became New York Freeman under his sole proprietorship.
In keeping with its name, the New York Globe thought its mission to be broad and universal in scope-insofar as African American readership was concerned-and the newspaper sought to provide as much information pertaining to African Americans as possible within its four pages. Its self-stated aim was “to supply the place of a National Journal for the colored people of the United States.” The New York Globe had a staff of able correspondents in many cities in the North and the South who reported news of race conditions and political developments related to the race. Also, newsletters from smaller communities reported local trivia including activities of churches and fraternal organizations; one reporter of such information was the teenager Du Bois.
Like Fortune’s then national standing among African Americans-though still a teenager-Du Bois understood that his unusual pedigree afforded him a distinct role among Great Barrington African Americans, particularly the recent arrivals who were both Southern and religious, and his first commentaries in T. Thomas Fortune’s New York Globe (Freeman) relied upon this exceptional background.
One would be remiss to deny that Du Bois might have been influenced by Fortune’s longstanding idea that intelligent, African American opinion in matters civil and sacred would always receive a public hearing in spite of its disassociation from explicit religious efforts. (Since Fortune and Du Bois, much—not all of—African American intellectual history, as early as Frederick Douglass, divorces itself from religion except for decrying against it yet do not consider itself unqualified to comment upon most religious matters.) And this quality in Du Bois’s career began in his earliest writings within Fortune’s newspaper. Du Bois emulated T. Thomas Fortune’s method of expressing his intelligent and sophisticated opinion on African American social problems through an alternative “pulpit,” namely the secular periodical.
Notwithstanding, T. Thomas Fortune’s relationship to Booker T. Washington as ghostwriter, propagandist, confidante and ardent supporter was something altogether different. The two were contemporaries born in the same year, 1856, and their relationship was chronicled and detailed through Booker T. Washington’s letters, correspondence and ghost-written works dating back to their very first recorded correspondence on January 18, 1887 in a letter to Fortune from Washington. And one of the last being an October 30, 1907 letter from Washington to Daniel Hale Williams describing Fortune’s personal and professional conditions at the time which essentially cemented the end of their long relationship.
All the same, Washington would die in 1915 and Fortune would die in 1928. (Du Bois would live on until 1968.) Besides Emmett J. Scott, Washington’s modern day Chief of Staff at Tuskegee, Fortune would be one of the few who was in Washington’s personal circle who could speak freely on most matters. Furthermore, Fortune’s geographical positioning in the North alongside of Du Bois and other “race men” who opposed Washington and the “Tuskegee Machine,” or “Tuskegee Idea,” allowed him to serve as Washington’s voice in the North and black press against Du Bois and like-minded northern black intellectuals.
In the final analysis, T. Thomas Fortune’s standing as a writer was rivaled and eventually surpassed by W.E.B. Du Bois who nominally was his protege and his abilities as national tactician could only be surpassed by Booker T. Washington. Thus, ‘he stood between giants.’ (Fortune was recently featured in the HBO series The Gilded Age.)
