A 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.