Politics & Power Quote by Timothy Thomas Fortune

Fortune is drawing a hard line against the seductive comfort of the in-group, and he does it in the plain, prosecutorial language of civic hygiene: “not safe,” “not good.” The repetition is the point. He isn’t offering a moral nicety; he’s issuing a risk assessment for a republic that depends, at least in theory, on citizens who can imagine obligations beyond blood, faction, church, or race.

What makes the phrasing bite is the double bind he names: clannishness can be “compulsory” or “voluntary,” and either way it corrodes. Compulsory clannishness is the world of segregation, patronage, and coercive identity politics, where people are sorted and disciplined into blocs. Voluntary clannishness is trickier: it’s the self-protective retreat into tight circles that feels rational in a hostile society but still shrinks the democratic “we.” Fortune’s subtext is that a republic can’t survive if public life becomes a federation of mutually suspicious clubs, each bargaining for spoils rather than committing to shared rules.

Context matters. Fortune, a Black journalist and a leading voice in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lived through Reconstruction’s collapse, the rise of Jim Crow, and the era when “race problem” rhetoric often blamed Black people for the consequences of white supremacy. His warning, then, isn’t naive about power. It’s strategic. He’s arguing that the fight for full citizenship can’t be won by mirroring the nation’s worst habit - tribal gatekeeping - because the cost is paid twice: the state becomes brittle, and the individual’s moral and intellectual range gets hemmed in by loyalty tests.