T. Thomas Fortune

Born a slave in Florida, T. Thomas Fortune was freed after emancipation. As a young man, he headed north to Washington D.C. where he attended Howard University and worked for a local newspaper. He then settled in New York City and established himself as a newspaper editor, founding the New York Globe, which he later renamed the Freeman and finally the Age. My grandfather, Jerome B. Peterson, served as co-editor of the Age for many years. Fortune was one of several prominent black New Yorkers who became disillusioned with the Republican Party in the last decades of the nineteenth-century, and for a period of time switched allegiance to the Democratic Party.