Jersey Shore Magazine

J e r s e y s h o r e • F A L L / H O L I D A Y 2 0 2 3 48 JERSEY SHORE PROFILE THESE WALLS CAN TALK, continued from page 47 Through community outreach, education, the arts, and public pro- gramming, The Center aims to fulfill the T. Thomas Fortune Foundation's mission of preserving and furthering Fortune's civil rights and social jus- tice advocacy. For over twenty years, The Center's Executive Director, Gilda Rogers, has meshed her interests in writing and history with Fortune's legacy as a champion for equity and equality. She holds a master's degree in history from Monmouth University, along with an impressive resume smattered with counseling, speaking, teaching, and writing credits. However, her leadership and work with The Center make her light shine the brightest. "Using my background as a journalist and an educator is my purpose," she said, "and here, I get to do that every day." But who was T. Thomas Fortune? Timothy Thomas Fortune was born into slavery in Marianna, Florida to Emanuel and Sara Jane Fortune on October 3, 1856. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, his fam- ily moved to Jacksonville, where he attended Edwin M. Stanton School and worked as both a page in the senate and as an apprentice printer at a Jacksonville newspaper. He attend- ed Howard University as a journalism major, then left school to work at the People's Advocate, a newspaper in Washington, D.C. Shortly after marrying Carrie C. Smiley, they moved to New York City in 1879. He became a journalist and editor of a newspaper titled The Rumor, which changed its name to The New York Globe. After the Globe closed in 1884, Fortune published the first issue of his paper, The New York Freeman, which became The New York Age in 1887. Considered the most prominent Black journalist of the time, Fortune's twenty-year tenure at The New York Age led to the paper becoming the nation's most influential and widely read Black newspaper. Fortune saw himself as an activist to defend the rights of Blacks and the press as an avenue to promote racial equality. His tireless crusade for a just and equitable society resulted in his work being published in over twenty books, countless articles, and more than three hundred editori- als. He also organized the National Afro-American League in 1887 and was a long-time adviser to Booker T. Washington. Fortune encouraged rigid journal- istic ethics and abstained from sen- sationalism as he guided the thriving industry of African American print- ing and publishing into an era of respect and progress. Some consider the luminary to be the bridge to the modern Civil Rights Movement. In 1901, Fortune moved with his Gilda Rogers, Executive Director of the T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center. Jill Ocone

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