Gentleman of Color

A Gentleman of Color is the first adult biography of James Forten (1766-1842), a free black who was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, Philadelphia sailmaker, prominent businessman, famous abolitionist, and patriarch of one of the most important African American families in the nineteenth century. This book restores Forten to the pantheon of African Americans who fundamentally shaped American history, alongside Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King, Jr.