George W. Forbes

George W. Forbes (1864-1927) was an American journalist who advocated for African-American civil rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best known for co-founding the Boston Guardian, an African-American newspaper in which he and William Monroe Trotter published editorials excoriating Booker T. Washington for his accommodationist approach to race relations. He also founded and edited the Boston Courant, one of Boston's earliest black newspapers, and edited the A. M. E. Church Review, a national publication.

Born into slavery in Mississippi, Forbes was soon emancipated. As a youth, he worked as a laborer but went North at age 14 to pursue education. He worked as a laborer at Harvard University to save money, and graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts. Settling in Boston, he gained a national reputation as a journalist. Locally, he was well known as the reference librarian at the West End branch of the Boston Public Library, where he worked for 32 years. He was the Boston system's first black librarian.