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A Comparison of T. Thomas Fortune and Booker T. Washington

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A Comparison of T. Thomas Fortune and Booker T. Washington
Alex Roth
White Power/Black Leadership
November 14, 2007 Booker T. Washington and T. Thomas Fortune 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 (wikipedia). The life of T Thomas Fortune spanned several significant periods in American history. His seventy-two years included the experiences of slavery, Reconstruction, "the Nadir," and the Harlem Renaissance. In varying degrees, these opposing periods in time influenced and determined the direction of Fortune 's life and the realization if his identity as an "Afro-American.” On the other hand, one of the most influential, celebrated, and criticized black leaders of the twentieth century was Booker T. Washington. Few public figures in African American life during the period of post-slavery excited as much passion and misunderstanding as Washington. Born a slave and deprived of any early education, he became America’s foremost black educator of the late 1890s and early 1900s, introducing the nation to his own brand of education and reform for the post-Civil War United States. Besides using his journalistic pulpit to demand equal economic opportunity for blacks and equal protection under the law, T. Thomas 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 (Thornbrough). However, his great hopes for the league never materialized, and he gradually began to abandon his militant position in favor of educator/activist Booker T. Washington 's compromising, accommodationist stance


Cited: Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 1996. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 1997. Fortune, Thomas T. Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South. New York: Arno Press, 1968. Thornbrough, Emma Lou. T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist. New York: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Bracey, John H., August Meier, and Elliot Rudwick. Black Nationalism in America. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc, 1970 “Wikipedia.” 9 Nov. 2007
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