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T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880-1928 AUTHOR: TIMOTHY THOMAS FORTUNE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA, 2010 PRICE: $65.00 ISBN: 978-0-8130-3232-0
In T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator, Shawn Leigh Alexander has brought together thirty-five works written by Timothy Thomas Fortune. This is the first time that one volume has been put together such that its primary purpose is to call attention to Fortune's writings, and, through them, to Fortune's thinking. Fortune (1856-1928) was an important black American social and political thinker belonging to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; he was also a political activist and, by profession, a newspaper person. For some, he was the most important black American social and political thinker between the time of Frederick Douglass and that of Booker T. Washington.
As a political activist, Fortune was one of the founders of, and served as one of the chief executive officers of, two organizations which were forerunners to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: in 1890 the Afro- American League, which was the first national civil rights organization in the United States, and in 1898 the Afro- American Council. Through them as well as through writings associated with them, Fortune advocated against racial discrimination, racial segregation, and racial violence aimed at black Americans.
As a newspaper person, Fortune was the editor successively of four black American newspapers: in the nineteenth century, The New York Globe, The New York Freeman, as well as The New York Age, and, in the twentieth century, the official organ of Marcus Garvey 's United Negro Improvement Association, The Negro World. In editorials and opinion pieces published in the newspapers he edited as well as in other periodicals, Fortune advocated for equal opportunity, equal access to public places, and equal protection under the law.
All but three of the writings included in this volume come from periodicals: newspapers as well as popular and professional magazines. They are editorials and opinions pieces.
The writings coming from periodicals are distributed across the literature in this manner. Seven of them come from The New York Globe. Six of them come from The AM.E. Church Review; four, from The Negro World; three, from each of The New York Age and The New...