Book Review: 'After War Times: An African American Childhood in Reconstruction-era Florida' by T. Thomas Fortune
By Michael Hoffman
Sun, Jun 7, 2015 @ 1:50 pm
T. Thomas Fortune was an influential African-American public intellectual at the turn of the 20th century, a journalist, and the author of two books. His peers and colleagues included Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Alexander Crummell and Marcus Garvey. Fortune was born and raised in Florida and his “After War Times,” which covers his youth during Reconstruction, was serialized in two black newspapers a year before his death in 1928.
He was born in 1856 into a slave family residing outside Marianna, the county seat of Jackson County, which was the western edge of the “Cotton Kingdom” in Florida. In his veins ran the blood of Africans, Irish, Jews and Seminoles. His father, Emanuel Fortune Sr., was a tanner and shoemaker and, as Fortune remembers, his mother was the most beautiful woman in the county. When emancipation came, Fortune Sr. seized the opportunities presented and soon operated a prosperous subsistence farm, became a lay leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and was respected by both blacks and whites as a natural leader.
The county’s antebellum population was evenly divided between whites and black slaves. There was no Sherman to torch Jackson County and a single significant Union foray was repulsed by the home guard. After emancipation came, there immediately appeared both resentment and a growing resistance among many whites to the ongoing revolutionary social, political and economic changes of Reconstruction. Freedmen’s Bureau agents sought to match the needs of white landowners for labor and the needs of freedmen for work, to protect the suffrage of freedmen, and to bring education to their children.
Despite Emanuel Fortune’s willingness to cooperate across racial lines with men of good faith, even former Confederates, he became a potential target in the internecine conflict known as the Jackson County War that raged from 1869-71. This was a war of assassinations and arson, fought under the cover of darkness. Fortune Sr., who was elected to the Legislature in 1868, 1869 and 1870, always carried a firearm during those years when he left his house and tried to be home before dark. These were difficult times for the entire Fortune family, but most of all, Fortune says, for his beloved mother, who died in 1871.
Fortune Sr. moved his family to Jacksonville in 1870, where he made his mark during those brief decades when Jacksonville, according to James Weldon Johnson, was a good place for African-Americans. Fortune Sr. continued to be a proponent of interracial cooperation and held a number of elected or appointed offices including city marshal, county commissioner, board of health member and, in 1887, was elected on a bi-racial, independent ticket to serve as city councilman for a predominantly white district. The yellow fever epidemic of 1888-89 and the subsequent loss of home rule for the next four years laid the basis for Jim Crow Jacksonville, which gradually put an end to the interracial politics.
Fortune was not merely a witness to this revolutionary history but, as a young man in Florida, was able to use his political and church connections to be a participant. He served as a Senate page in two Florida legislative sessions; at 16 received a patronage appointment to be a postal agent on the train that carried mail between Jacksonville and Chattahoochee, and at 18 went to Washington, D.C., where he used his contacts to find employment in the Treasury and Customs bureaus.
Like many 19th-century authors and journalists, he learned to write via the printing trade, beginning as a printer’s devil in Marianna and advancing to compositor at the Jacksonville Union, then a white-owned newspaper with Republican sympathies. Fortune also took advantage of the formal educational opportunities opening up for young black men and women. In Jacksonville he attended Stanton, the first public school for blacks in Florida, and later attended night law school classes at Howard University. In his late 20s, after moving to New York City, he became the editor of the first of four important African-American newspapers that he would eventually manage or own.
“After War Times” was written in the third person, which is off-putting to the contemporary reader, and the chronology is hazy. Both of these flaws are remedied with the endnotes of editor Daniel R. Weinfeld, author of “The Jackson County War,” an introduction by Dawn J. Herd-Clark of Fort Valley State University that fills in many gaps about Fortune’s early life in Florida, and an afterword by Tameka Bradley Hobbs of Florida Memorial University that places Fortune in the context of turn-of-the-century political and intellectual achievements of “Afro-Americans” (a term that Fortune popularized.)
Michael Hoffmann is a historian who lives in Duval County.
Sun, Jun 7, 2015 @ 1:50 pm
T. Thomas Fortune was an influential African-American public intellectual at the turn of the 20th century, a journalist, and the author of two books. His peers and colleagues included Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Alexander Crummell and Marcus Garvey. Fortune was born and raised in Florida and his “After War Times,” which covers his youth during Reconstruction, was serialized in two black newspapers a year before his death in 1928.
He was born in 1856 into a slave family residing outside Marianna, the county seat of Jackson County, which was the western edge of the “Cotton Kingdom” in Florida. In his veins ran the blood of Africans, Irish, Jews and Seminoles. His father, Emanuel Fortune Sr., was a tanner and shoemaker and, as Fortune remembers, his mother was the most beautiful woman in the county. When emancipation came, Fortune Sr. seized the opportunities presented and soon operated a prosperous subsistence farm, became a lay leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and was respected by both blacks and whites as a natural leader.
The county’s antebellum population was evenly divided between whites and black slaves. There was no Sherman to torch Jackson County and a single significant Union foray was repulsed by the home guard. After emancipation came, there immediately appeared both resentment and a growing resistance among many whites to the ongoing revolutionary social, political and economic changes of Reconstruction. Freedmen’s Bureau agents sought to match the needs of white landowners for labor and the needs of freedmen for work, to protect the suffrage of freedmen, and to bring education to their children.
Despite Emanuel Fortune’s willingness to cooperate across racial lines with men of good faith, even former Confederates, he became a potential target in the internecine conflict known as the Jackson County War that raged from 1869-71. This was a war of assassinations and arson, fought under the cover of darkness. Fortune Sr., who was elected to the Legislature in 1868, 1869 and 1870, always carried a firearm during those years when he left his house and tried to be home before dark. These were difficult times for the entire Fortune family, but most of all, Fortune says, for his beloved mother, who died in 1871.
Fortune Sr. moved his family to Jacksonville in 1870, where he made his mark during those brief decades when Jacksonville, according to James Weldon Johnson, was a good place for African-Americans. Fortune Sr. continued to be a proponent of interracial cooperation and held a number of elected or appointed offices including city marshal, county commissioner, board of health member and, in 1887, was elected on a bi-racial, independent ticket to serve as city councilman for a predominantly white district. The yellow fever epidemic of 1888-89 and the subsequent loss of home rule for the next four years laid the basis for Jim Crow Jacksonville, which gradually put an end to the interracial politics.
Fortune was not merely a witness to this revolutionary history but, as a young man in Florida, was able to use his political and church connections to be a participant. He served as a Senate page in two Florida legislative sessions; at 16 received a patronage appointment to be a postal agent on the train that carried mail between Jacksonville and Chattahoochee, and at 18 went to Washington, D.C., where he used his contacts to find employment in the Treasury and Customs bureaus.
Like many 19th-century authors and journalists, he learned to write via the printing trade, beginning as a printer’s devil in Marianna and advancing to compositor at the Jacksonville Union, then a white-owned newspaper with Republican sympathies. Fortune also took advantage of the formal educational opportunities opening up for young black men and women. In Jacksonville he attended Stanton, the first public school for blacks in Florida, and later attended night law school classes at Howard University. In his late 20s, after moving to New York City, he became the editor of the first of four important African-American newspapers that he would eventually manage or own.
“After War Times” was written in the third person, which is off-putting to the contemporary reader, and the chronology is hazy. Both of these flaws are remedied with the endnotes of editor Daniel R. Weinfeld, author of “The Jackson County War,” an introduction by Dawn J. Herd-Clark of Fort Valley State University that fills in many gaps about Fortune’s early life in Florida, and an afterword by Tameka Bradley Hobbs of Florida Memorial University that places Fortune in the context of turn-of-the-century political and intellectual achievements of “Afro-Americans” (a term that Fortune popularized.)
Michael Hoffmann is a historian who lives in Duval County.
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