Born in Marianna, Florida, to slave parents, T. Thomas Fortune had African, Irish, and American Indian ancestry. He went to the first school for black children opened in town after the Civil War, and, after constantly peering through the window of the print shop at the local paper, he was offered the chance to "stick type" into words. The family moved to Jacksonville after it was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan, and Fortune went to Tallahassee as a page in the state senate to help with family expenses. He studied at the Stanton Institute and became an expert typesetter at the Jacksonville Daily Union. Through the efforts of a local congressman, the seventeen-year-old Fortune was given the job of postal agent on a railway line. He then became a customs inspector in Delaware and stayed there long enough to save the money needed...