George W. Forbes (1864-1927) was an American journalist who advocated for African-American civil rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best known for co-founding the Boston Guardian, an African-American newspaper in which he and William Monroe Trotter published editorials excoriating Booker T. Washington for his accommodationist approach to race relations. He also founded and edited the Boston Courant, one of Boston's earliest black newspapers, and edited the A. M. E. Church Review, a national publication.
Forbes was born to enslaved parents in Mississippi, worked as a laborer at Harvard University, and graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts before gaining a national reputation as a journalist. Locally, he was well known as the reference librarian at the West End branch of the Boston Public Library, where he worked for 32 years. He was the Boston system's first black librarian.
Early life and education
Forbes' parents were enslaved in Shannon, Mississippi, where he was born in 1864. After the Civil War and emancipation, he worked as a laborer and a farm hand. At the age of 14 he left Mississippi for Ohio, where he studied for a time at Wilberforce University. In the mid-1880s he moved to Boston, where he worked for three or four years as a laborer at Harvard University, and saved up to continue his education. While living in Boston he befriended W.E.B. Du Bois, who was studying at Harvard at the time, and who went on to become one of the most influential African-American leaders of the period.
In 1888, Forbes enrolled in Amherst College in western Massachusetts, where he made two lifelong friends: William H. Lewis, a pioneering black athlete who became an assistant U.S. attorney general, and William T. Jackson, who became an influential educator. Du Bois attended their graduation ceremony in 1892.
Career
After college, Forbes returned to Boston, where he aligned himself with a group of black activists known informally as "the radicals." The group, which included his classmate Lewis as well as William Monroe Trotter, Archibald Grimké, Butler R. Wilson, Clement G. Morgan, and other black intellectuals, was critical of Booker T. Washington's accommodationist approach to race relations. That fall he started one of Boston's earliest African-American newspapers, the Boston Courant (not to be confused with the periodical by the same name founded in 1995), a weekly paper which he owned and edited until it folded for financial reasons five years later.
In 1896 he became the Boston Public Library system's first black librarian when he was hired as an assistant librarian at the West End branch, the largest branch in Boston. At the time, the West End was a predominantly black neighborhood. As waves of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe began to fill up the West End tenements, and black Bostonians began moving to the South End, the West End became increasingly Jewish. Forbes stayed put, becoming a neighborhood institution at the West End branch, where he worked for 32 years without taking a single sick day.
In 1901, Forbes co-founded the Boston Guardian with William Monroe Trotter. According to Clement G. Morgan, Forbes provided the editorial know-how and literary ability, while Trotter provided the funding. In the first issue, published on November 9, 1901, Forbes and Trotter declared their intent to fight for equal rights: "We have come to protest forever against being proscribed or shut off in any caste from equal rights with other citizens, and shall remain forever on the firing line at any and all times in defence of such rights."
For the first two years, Forbes wrote most of the editorials. His sharp criticism of Washington soon garnered national attention. As Du Bois wrote later in The Crisis:
The Boston Guardian was radical, intransigent and absolutely clear. It opposed Mr. Washington's doctrine of surrender and compromise and it opposed this doctrine with editorials that flamed and scorched and George Washington Forbes wrote them....Whatever has been accomplished from that day to this in beating back the forces of surrender and submission and in making the American Negro stand on both feet and demand full citizenship rights in America, has been due in no small degree to Forbes' work on the Boston Guardian.