After War Times
An African American Childhood in Reconstruction-Era Florida
T. Thomas Fortune was a leading African American publisher, editor, and journalist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who was born a slave in antebellum Florida, lived through emancipation, and rose to become a literary lion of his generation. In T. Thomas Fortune's “After War Times,” Daniel R. Weinfeld brings together a series of twenty-three autobiographical articles Fortune wrote about his formative childhood during Reconstruction and subsequent move to Washington, DC.
By 1890, Fortune had founded a predecessor organization to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, known as the National Afro-American League, but his voice found its most powerful expression and influence in poetry, prose, and journalism. It was as a journalist that Fortune stirred national controversy by issuing a passionate appeal to African American southerners: “I propose to start a crusade,” he proclaimed in June 1900, “to have the negroes of the South leave that section and to come north or go elsewhere. It is useless to remain in the South and cry Peace! Peace! When there is no peace.” The movement he helped propel became known as “the Great Migration.”
By focusing on Thomas’s ruminations about his disillusion with post–Civil War Florida, Weinfeld highlights the sources of Fortune’s deep disenchantment with the South, which intensified when the Reconstruction order gave way to Jim Crow–era racial discrimination and violence. Decades after he left the South, Fortune’s vivid memories of incidents and personalities in his past informed his political opinions and writings. Scholars and readers interested in Southern history in the aftermath of the Civil War, especially the experiences of African Americans, will find much of interest in this vital collection of primary writings.
Born a slave in Marianna, Florida, in 1856, T. Thomas Fortune was freed by the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865, attended Howard College in the late 1870s, and became a journalist, editor, and publisher in New York City, most notably as editor and co-owner of the New York Age. He cofounded in 1890 the Afro-American League, a precursor to the Niagara Falls Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Daniel R. Weinfeld is author of The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in Post–Civil War Florida as well as articles about the Reconstruction era in the Florida Historical Quarterly and Southern Jewish History.
Dawn J. Herd-Clark is an associate professor of history at Fort Valley State University, in Fort Valley, Georgia. Tameka Bradley Hobbs is an assistant professor of history at Florida Memorial University, in Miami, Florida.
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