Born a slave in Marianna, Florida, in 1856, T. Thomas Fortune was freed by the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865, attended Howard College in the late 1870s, and became a journalist, editor, and publisher in New York City, most notably as editor and co-owner of the New York Age. He cofounded in 1890 the Afro-American League, a precursor to the Niagara Falls Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Daniel R. Weinfeld is author of The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in Post–Civil War Florida as well as articles about the Reconstruction era in the Florida Historical Quarterly and Southern Jewish History.
Dawn J. Herd-Clark is an associate professor of history at Fort Valley State University, in Fort Valley, Georgia. Tameka Bradley Hobbs is an assistant professor of history at Florida Memorial University, in Miami, Florida.