T. Thomas Fortune
By 
Robin D.G. Kelley, who you should all read, has an essay in the Boston Review about T. Thomas Fortune, one of the lesser known but critically important Black activists we can learn from today.
I happily participated in Black Reconstruction study groups and public forums meant to divine wisdom for our current movements. But I often wondered why no one was scrambling to resurrect T. Thomas Fortune’s Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South, published in 1884. After all, it was Fortune who wrote: “The South must spend less money on penitentiaries and more money on schools; she must use less powder and buckshot and more law and equity; she must pay less attention to politics and more attention to the development of her magnificent resources.” Du Bois, on the other hand, praised Reconstruction efforts to establish and improve the penitentiary system in what proved to be a futile effort to eliminate the convict lease. Much shorter but no less powerful, Fortune’s Black and White anticipates Du Bois’s critique of federal complicity in undermining Black freedom, but sharply diverges by declaring Reconstruction a miserable failure. He argues that the South’s problems can be traced to the federal government allowing the slaveholding rebels to return to power and hold the monopoly of land, stripping Black people of their short-lived citizenship rights, and refusing to compensate freed people for generations of unpaid labor. The result was a new kind of slavery: “the United States took the slave and left the thing which gave birth to chattel slavery and which is now fast giving birth to industrial slavery.” Du Bois echoes Fortune, but adds that white labor’s investment in white supremacy ensured “a system of industry which ruined democracy.”
Fortune, by contrast, believed racism would ultimately wither away, but not without a struggle. Formerly enslaved people with proper education, he held, would have to lead the way. He remarks on how Black people came out of bondage, not as robbers and thieves but as industrious, hard-working, family- and community-oriented people:
“while the white men of the South, the capitalists, the land-sharks, the poor white trash, and the nondescripts, with a thousand years of Christian civilization and culture behind them . . . organized themselves into a band of outlaws, whose concatenative chain of auxiliaries ran through the entire South, and deliberately proceeded to murder innocent men and women for POLITICAL REASONS and to systematically rob them of their honest labor because they were too accursedly lazy to labor themselves.”
And still, he believed interracial working-class unity was not only possible but necessary for “political reasons” to bring an end to monopoly and private ownership of land, the source of inequality. “Individual ownership in the land,” he writes, “is a transgression of the common right of man, and a usurpation which produces nearly, if not all, the evils which result upon our civilization; the inequalities which produce pauperism, vice, crime, and wide-spread demoralization among all the so-called ‘lower classes.’”
…
But Fortune was no Marxist, and his “anti-capitalism” was ambivalent at best. He was against monopoly and the concentration of wealth, an issue that concerned many classical economists at the time trying to understand growing inequality and the boom and bust cycles of U.S. capitalism during the “gilded age.” On one side, he rejected the bogus Social Darwinist theories of Herbert Spencer and Yale Professor William Graham Sumner who claimed that the wealthy owed their success to natural selection and the “natural” laws of the free market. On this view, business acumen, character, frugality, thrift, a work ethic, and intelligence were heritable traits that the poor and non-whites presumably lacked. Of course, few “robber barons” displayed all of these characteristics, but it did not stop them from invoking evolution to explain the deepening wealth divide. Darwinian explanations for class inequality found their greatest proponent in Sumner, whose book, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883), appeared a year before Black and White. His answer, unsurprisingly, is nothing: neither the rich nor the government ought to help the poor as doing so would disrupt the natural order. The poor can learn the values of success so long as they are unhindered by government aid, irresponsible charity, or trade unions. Government’s role is merely to protect “the property of men and the honor of women.
At the time Fortune clearly regarded capital and labor as antagonistic. He wrote in a column in 1886, “The black man who arrays himself on the side of capitalism as against labor would be like a black man before the war taking sides with the pro-slavery as against the anti-slavery advocates.” But this did not mean he supported socialist or anarchist movements. In fact, he drew primarily on thinkers who not only believed socialist and anarchist groups undermined organized labor, but opposed strikes and militant labor action as dangerous.
Fortune models much of his argument on William Godwin Moody’s 1883 text, Land and Labor in the United States, which argues that land monopoly replaced small farms with “food factories” worked by machines or “tenant farms peopled by feudal slaves,” resulting in overcrowded cities, low wages, high unemployment, and poverty. However, he also blames labor unions for the state of the economy. “Of all the monopolies and tyrannies of capital,” he writes, “there is not one that equals the suicidal selfishness of the workingmen.” Unions, he asserts, have destroyed the apprenticeship system, deskilled labor, dictated wages, and forced workers to strike, disrupting productivity and encouraging idleness and violence. “[B]y disunion, proscription, violence, a narrow minded selfishness and unreason,” unions have “madly thrown away their great opportunities and become weaker and weaker; whilst the capitalists, insignificant in numbers, but powerful in unity and wise in their methods, have as surely increased in strength, and never more rapidly than at the present time.” Moody suggests replacing strikes with intelligent arbitration involving “society men”; reducing the working day to six hours in order to increase employment, raise wages, and permit more leisure time; ending tenant farming and redistributing land “to the people” through the Homestead Act; double taxing all unimproved lands; and granting government control of transportation.
I actually think the biggest reason Fortune isn’t more well known and well read today is that the Gilded Age was so weird and everyone was struggling to figure out what to do about it and so they were writing some really weird books that require a certain understanding of the period that is hard to pick up without some real study. But Fortune is a critically important figure, perhaps equal to DuBois, and we probably need to be paying more attention to his work and his influence on our history.