Fortune (American slave)

Fortune (c. 1743 – 1798) was an enslaved African-American who achieved posthumous notability over the transfer of his remains from a museum storage room to a state funeral.

Under the laws of the 18th-century American colonial period, Fortune, his wife Dinah, and their four children, Africa, Jacob, Mira, and Roxa, were slaves of Preserved Porter, a physician in Waterbury, Connecticut.

[1] Fortune died in 1798; a snapped vertebrae suggested death by a fall, though earlier historians had reported that he drowned in the Naugatuck River.

[3] On November 2, 2024, a dedication ceremony was held at the North End Recreation Center in Waterbury, Connecticut to unveil a new mural in honor of Fortune.

The Fortune Mural Project was an effort initiated in August 2023 by the Alex Breanne Corporation, a Connecticut-based non-profit focused on researching the formerly enslaved, then injecting them into the communities where they lived, worked or died.

It celebrates those who were kind-hearted, God fearing, and raised families, all while enduring racism, bias and mistreatment; doing so long enough for us all to exist today.