George W Forbes

From the early 1890s until the early 1900s, George W. Forbes owned and edited two African-American newspapers in Boston, Massachusetts. Through them, he developed a local and national reputation as a proponent of full rights of citizenship for African Americans in the United States.

George Washington Forbes was born in Shannon, Mississippi, in 1864 (the exact date is unknown), just before the end of the Civil War. His parents had been slaves and must have encouraged him to follow his desire to study and leave Mississippi. For a while, Forbes, who probably received little education in Mississippi, worked at labor jobs and on farms. Sometime around 1878, he left Mississippi permanently, traveling first to Ohio, where he studied for a while at Wilberforce University.

In the mid-1880s, Forbes moved to Boston. For three or four years, he worked as a laborer at Harvard University. Having saved enough money to continue his education, he left Boston in 1888 to enroll in Amherst College. He graduated from Amherst in 1892, his graduation was attended by a friend he had met in Boston, W. E. B. DuBois, who would later become one of the most important African American leaders of his day.

After graduation, Forbes returned to Boston. He became a member of an informal group of black Boston activists, known as the "radicals," whose most prominent member was William Monroe Trotter. In the autumn after his graduation, Forbes founded the Boston Courant, the second African-American newspaper in Boston. Knowing that he would not be making much money as an editor of a fledgling newspaper, Forbes also worked as a librarian at the Boston Public Library.

Forbes edited the Courant for five years. When the Courant folded in 1897 as a result of financial problems, Forbes kept working at his library job while he waited to see whether he and his friends could found another newspaper to take the Courant's place. In 1901, he and Trotter founded the Guardian, through which Forbes quickly made a name for himself by writing editorials that attacked Booker Taliaferro Washington, the most prominent African-American leader of that time.

Forbes and his partner Trotter took issue with Washington's forgiving stance toward racist laws that segregated African Americans from whites in public places and made it difficult for blacks to vote. Both men believed that a much more confrontational style opposing such laws was needed and faulted Washington as too timid.

In November of 1900, Forbes married Marie Elizabeth Harley of Kingston, New York.

After a personal dispute between Forbes and Trotter in 1903, Forbes left the paper. He participated to a small degree with his old friend W. E. B. DuBois in the founding of the Niagara Movement, the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). However, from about 1910 Forbes withdrew from politics and devoted himself to working at the Boston Public Library and writing a book, which was never published, about African-American literature.

George Forbes died on March 10, 1927.

Sources: Extant Collections of Early Black Newspapers: A Research Guide to the Black Press, 1880–1915, with an Index to the Boston Guardian, 1902–1904 by Georgetta Merritt Campbell, Troy, NY, Whitston, 1981; African-Americans in Boston: More than 350 Years by Robert C. Hayden (1992)