T. Thomas Fortune Research Paper

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T. Thomas Fortune was born in Marianna, Florida, on October 3, 1856. Fortune and his parents, Emanuel and Sara Fortune, were all born into slavery. After the Emancipation Proclamation, his family was freed and able to acquire a last name. His father believed that his father was an Irishmen, therefore he acquired the surname of Thomas. Initially a carpenter by trade, Fortune 's father became active in the Reconstruction period of the United States, winning the election to the Florida House of Representatives in 1868. As a kid growing up in the south, Fortune witness a lot of politically charged racism. Three years after his father’s election, the Florida Ku Klux Klan ran them out of Marianna (Greason, 2013).
As a child, Fortune did not receive a formal education. He attended school very seldom, yet he gained an impressive amount of knowledge about politics and governmental issues by observing his
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E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, just to name a few. He has a huge, however regularly overlooked legacy, operating at a profit radical scholarly custom of the twentieth century (Thornbrough, 1972).
T. Thomas Fortune entered into the world of journalism at a time where not only African-Americans were not accepted, they were just being recognized as being human. At an early stage he summed up his perspective in a writing entitled "The Editor 's Mission." Blacks must have a voice in choosing their own particular predetermination, Fortune composed, and not trust Whites to characterize their "place." Since the majority of the northern and southern White press was against equivalent rights, Black people required their own daily papers to counter this impact.
In Fortune’s opinion, the mark of being colored made African-Americans a social outcast and opened to be victimized and mistreated (T. Thomas

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