This journal soon changed its name to The New York Globe. The Globe closed in November 1884 after a dispute with co-editor William B. Derrick, and one week later, on November 22, Fortune published the first issue of his New York Freeman. In the late 1880s, he was considered the greatest black newspaper writer in America. That same year he published a book entitled Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South that, along with his 1885 pamphlet, The Negro in Politics, openly challenged Frederick Douglass's dictum that "the Republican Party is the ship, all else the open sea". In 1885, The Freeman took the new name of The New York Age and set out to become "The Afro-American Journal of News and Opinion". In 1890 Fortune was elected chairman of the executive committee of the National Afro-American Press Association at their meeting in Indianapolis. In Chicago on January 25, 1890, Fortune co-founded the militant National Afro-American League to right wrongs against African Americans authorized by law and sanctioned or tolerated by public opinion. The league fell apart after four years. When it was revived in Rochester, New York, on September 15, 1898, it had the new name of the "National Afro-American Council", with Bishop Alexander Walters as its first President and Fortune as a prominent member. Walters was followed as president by Fortune, who held the position from 1902 to 1904, and was succeeded by William Henry Steward. Booker T. Washington played a dominant role on the council and it included a number of important leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois, who went on to form the NAACP, and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells. The League and the council had a vital role in setting the stage for the Niagara Movement, NAACP, and other civil rights organizations to follow. Fortune was also the leading advocate of using "Afro-American" to identify his people. Since they are "African in origin and American in birth", it was his argument that it most accurately defined them. With Fortune at the helm as co-owner with Emanuel Fortune, Jr., and Jerome B. Peterson, the New York Age became the most widely read of all Black newspapers. It stood at the forefront as a voice agitating against the evils of discrimination, lynching, mob violence, and disenfranchisement. Its popularity was due in part to Fortune's editorials, which condemned all forms of discrimination and demanded