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.

Joseph Fischl

NYPL ID number: 116918

Mne of Mark; eminenet, progressive and rising, by William J. Simmons, n.d. Opposite page 785

Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Charles Ray

Born in Falmouth, Mass, Charles B. Ray moved to New York City in 1832. Although he was an ordained Methodist minister, Ray had many other occupations as well. He ran a boot and shoe store, and, In the late 1830s, took over the editorship of the city's black newspaper, the Colored American, for a short period of time. Ray was also actively engaged in many important political causes. He fought for the restitution of black male suffrage taken away by an amendment to the State constitution in 1822. He was a member of New York's Vigilance Committee and harbored many runaway slaves in in his home until they found safe passage to proceed North.

Carter Woodson, The Negro in Our History (1922).