[2] Born in 1964, Paul Ortiz is a third-generation military veteran and a first-generation college graduate.
He was a paratrooper and radio operator,[3][4] attaining the rank of sergeant, in the United States Army from 1982 to 1986 with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 7th Special Forces Group in Central America.
He received the US Armed Forces Humanitarian Service Medal for meritorious action in the wake of the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz stratovolcano in Tolima, Colombia, in November 1985.
Ortiz's publications include Emancipation Betrayed (University of California Press) a history of the Black Freedom struggle in Florida, and Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Jim Crow South (New Press).
His essay on the radical black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882) was published in Time Magazine online in 2018.