Timothy Thomas Fortune was one of the most powerful and influential African American journalists of the nineteenth century. Born into slavery in 1856, he was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, attended Howard University, and founded the New York Freeman, later renamed the New York Age. The Age was a voice of Black protest and defiance in the United States in a segregated age, demanding an end to lynching, Jim Crow discrimination, and voter disenfranchisement. Thus, the newspaper and its publisher became one of the foundations from which the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the civil rights movement would grow from in the twentieth century. By 1886, when he made this speech, Fortune was the most prominent Black newspaperman in the country.