Amos Fortune, Free Man

Following the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified. This amendment granted legal freedom to all then-enslaved people in the United States. By then, the nation had entered the Reconstruction Era, during which the government attempted to bring the divided nation back together as well as implement widespread integration for the newly freed Black people. During this time, the government established African American citizenship (14th Amendment, ratified in 1868) and their right to vote (15th Amendment, ratified in 1870). The government provided funding and troops in an attempt to create a pathway for emancipated people to be incorporated into the nation. The Freedmen’s Bureau—one of the signal projects under Reconstruction—functioned as a refugee center and managed Black resettlement. In 1877, however, Rutherford B. Hayes was elected president and obliged Southern demands to withdraw troops. Without strong government enforcement, Reconstruction ended, giving way to an era of expanding white supremacist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, race riots, lynching, the disbandment of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the overturning of much legislation that had enabled Black people to vote freely and acquire leadership roles. This was also the period during which Jim Crow law came about, legalizing segregation in the South. 

It is in response to this devastating social and legal assault on African American life that the Civil Rights Movement began in the early 1950s. Published in 1950, Amos Fortune, Free Man comes on the scene in this political environment. According to Dr. Sara L. Schwebel, Amos Fortune was largely unknown on a national level until Yates’s novel was published so there was little information available to support or refute Yates’s portrayal of Fortune’s life.  

Amos Fortune, Free Man responds to the political tensions of the era by “embed[ding] Fortune’s life within an understanding of slavery as a ‘school for civilization’” (Schwebel, Sara L. “Amos Fortune, Free Man: New Uses for a Children’s Classic.” Commonplace, 16 Mar. 2020). Schwebel explains that “[t]he belief that bondage was a necessary way station between African ‘savagery’ and American citizenship was widely embraced by mainstream historians, and the public at large, in the pre-Civil Rights era in which Yates wrote” (Schwebel). As Yates’s Fortune explicitly advocates for Black people to be patient and passive in regard to their enslavement, the novel seems to also be implying that mid-20th century African Americans should be patient and content with slow and individualized progress. In the latter half of the 20th century, this view was criticized for its reinforcement of stereotypes such as the benevolent enslaver and its portrayal of Black people as childlike individuals who needed to submit to Western, Christian ideals in order to be worthy of freedom.