By Laura D.C. Kolnoski
RED BANK – The borough’s storied journalistic past will be highlighted in “The Gilded Age,” the new HBO series from Jullian Fellowes, creator of “Downton Abbey,” debuting Jan. 24. Based on fictional high society denizens of New York City circa the late 1800s, the costume drama weaves in real persons from that era, among them publisher, author and journalist T. Thomas Fortune.
Portraying Fortune in three of the first season’s 10 episodes is actor Sullivan Jones, who communicated with The Two River Times via email Jan. 12. Last April, Jones made an under-the-radar visit to Red Bank’s T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center, located in Fortune’s restored home on Drs. James Parker Boulevard, to research the role.
“I spoke to (Jones) on the telephone, but he never said anything about portraying T. Thomas Fortune,” said Gilda Rogers, co-chairperson of the center’s board of directors who initiated the dilapidated home’s salvation and transformation into a museum and learning center.
“When he arrived he introduced himself, but still did not convey anything about him being an actor.”
When Rogers commented that Jones, like other first-time visitors, was likely unaware of Fortune’s legacy, he revealed why he was there. “We all screamed,” Rogers recalled of her and fellow volunteers – librarian/archivist Lynn Humphrey and board members Robin Blair and Karen Brittingham-Edmond – who toured the actor through the facility.
“I spoke about the history of T. Thomas Fortune, the family, the house and what was happening in Red Bank on the West Side with a Black developing professional community, business- es and the religious community, and how Fortune was the impetus, or what they refer to these days as an influencer,” Rogers related. “We took him upstairs to the Carrie Smiley Fortune Research Library and inundated him with books about Fortune. It was a day we will not forget.”
“When I was first notified that I had an audition for the role of T. Thomas Fortune in ‘The Gilded Age,’ I Googled Fortune’s name and, I’m embarrassed to admit it, was surprised to discover he was real person,” Jones wrote via email. “How did I not know who this dude was! I would come to find out that that’s exactly what most people say when I asked them if they were familiar with Fortune. After I got the role, I continued researching him, and was floored to find out that there was a cultural center dedicated to him only an hour drive from my house in Brooklyn. The museum is a treasure trove.”
Jones is previously known for playing Ed Austin, the lover of fashion designer Roy Haltson Fro- wick in Netflix’s “Halston” last year opposite Ewan McGregor, and Jameson Royce in the Amazon Prime Video comedy series “Harlem,” co-starring Whoopi Goldberg.
Fortune, born into slavery in 1856 Florida, was a journalist and newspaper publisher during the Gilded Age time period in New York, where his newspapers, The New York Globe, Freeman and the New York Age, were published. Known as a dynamic orator, his contemporaries included Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. In 1887, Fortune started the Black political organization The National Afro-American League, a precursor to the NAACP. He resided in Red Bank with his family from 1901-1910.
By mid-January, at least 50 people had registered for the center’s 8 p.m., Jan. 24 “The Gilded Age” watch party via Zoom, Rogers said. Participants will have an opportunity to talk with Jones, who is expected to join the party. The show features actresses Chris- tine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Audra McDonald, Kelli O’Hara and Meryl Streep’s daughter Louisa Jacobson, making her series debut. The first 10 episodes promise “drama, romance, and intrigue” as Manhattan’s rarified Old Guard clashes with newly minted tycoons. Other real persons portrayed by actors in the production include Clara Barton, Sanford White and Astor family members.
“My visit to the cultural center was an edifying and soul-stirring tour during which I was able to access Fortune’s poetry, newspaper articles, biographical information, art and artifacts from the era that sparked the first few glimmers of how I might be able to play Fortune in a way that could be soulful and specific,” Jones wrote. “I must give a special shout-out to Gilda Rogers and the other members of the cultural center who were there the day I visited. Their spirit, knowledge and generosity lit me up and left me beaming for weeks.”
“Sullivan will introduce a very large viewing audience to T. Thomas Fortune, who has lived in obscurity for so long,” said Rogers, herself a former newspaper reporter. “He was an important figure in American history.”
Jones said he has kept in touch with Rogers and intends to “exhaust her expertise by asking all manner of questions about Fortune’s life and life’s work.”
“There’s a saying I think of often – ‘Tradition isn’t the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire,’ ” Jones said. “The cultural center and those who are its custodians prove that the fire that T. Thomas Fortune tended and stoked 150 years ago continues to shimmer and blaze.”
For more information visit tthomasfortuneculturalcenter.org/fortune-onhbo, @t.thomasfortune on Instagram and @TThomasFortune9 on Twitter.
This article originally appeared in the Jan. 20 to 26, 2022, print edition of The Two River Times.
