[1] By 1910, his father having died, Fort-Whiteman had moved with his mother and younger sister to the Harlem area of New York City, where he worked as a hotel bellman to support the family while harboring dreams of becoming a professional actor.

[1] Soon abandoning his dramatic ambitions, Fort-Whiteman next spent two or three years in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, where he worked as an accounting clerk for a rope manufacturer, gaining fluency in the Spanish language and studying the rudiments of French.

[1] Fort-Whiteman was deeply inspired by the Mexican Revolution which swept the Yucatán in the spring of 1915, advancing a reform program over the staunch opposition of wealthy landowners and the Catholic church.

[2] He became a committed adherent to the idea of radical transformation of society through trade unions, syndicalism, as a member of an organization called Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker, or COM).

[2] He disembarked there and made his way to the city of Montreal, adopting the pseudonym "Harry W. Fort" and discreetly reentering the United States under the guise of a railroad dining car waiter.

[3] While at the Rand School Fort-Whiteman met others who would become prominent in the world radical movement in ensuing years, including Japanese émigré Sen Katayama and Otto Huiswoud, a recent transplant from British Guiana.

[4] Picking up the pen as the new "Dramatic Editor" of The Messenger in 1918, Fort-Whiteman was among those at the epicenter of the Harlem Renaissance, a multi-sided and dynamic black cultural movement dedicated to artistic and political development of the so-called "New Negro".

He reemerged in the public eye in February 1923 as a member of the editorial staff of The Messenger, although his affiliation with the Workers Party of America (WPA), a legal communist organization established around the first day of 1922, seems to have remained an unpublicized fact.

[7] In February 1924, Fort-Whiteman was tapped as one of 250 delegates to the "Negro Sanhedrin", a Chicago convention dedicated to issues of concern to black members of the working class, in which the WPA played a significant organizing role through its New York-based affiliate, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), headed by Cyril Briggs[8] Fort-Whiteman served as speaker for the WPA/ABB caucus and forward the organization's program, calling for an end to racial segregation in housing, binding contracts to protect tenant farmers, an end to colonialism in Africa, and US government recognition of the Soviet Union.

The American communist movement sought to capitalize upon the health and safety problems which ensued, initiating a short-lived mass organization (front group) known as the Negro Tenants Protective League to agitate for rent strikes and other forms of activity as a means of spurring change.

[11] Established by the Communist Party as a successor organization to the now moribund African Blood Brotherhood, the ANLC was founded by a convention of 500 men and women in Chicago late in October of that same year.

[11] Delegates attending this founding congress included substantial numbers of representatives of trade unions and sundry community organizations as well as unaffiliated working-class people rather than members of the so-called "Negro intelligentsia.

[16] Early in 1937, a massive campaign of arrests and punishments of alleged spies, saboteurs, and disloyal individuals was initiated by the Soviet secret police targeting especially Communist Party members and economic leaders.

[16][21][18] There the intentionally inadequate and miserable food supplied to the brutally overworked camp inmates and savage winter weather sapped Fort-Whiteman's strength and the formerly robust man's health rapidly failed.