Following the Unforgotten project—and inspired by his passion as a journalist for more than 35 years—Fountain decided in 2022 to launch FountainWorks with the hope of expanding his efforts to produce journalism that identifies those issues and stories often missed or neglected by the mainstream press, and that seek to humanize the people and places in marginalized African-American neighborhoods in Chicago and beyond with storytelling that is intimate, insightful and interesting. 

A former national correspondent for The New York Times, Fountain is also a former staff writer at the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune, where he was once that newspaper’s chief crime reporter. What he brings as a journalist to the Unforgotten Bureau is a plethora of experience inside American journalism’s most hallowed halls and his long-demonstrated passion for journalism and storytelling—particularly for mining for those stories on the other side of the tracks where he was raised on Chicago’s West Side. 

He grew up there in the North Lawndale neighborhood, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once lived with his family to bring attention to the plight of Chicago’s poor. About North Lawndale, the Chicago Tribune wrote in its heralded 1985 “American Millstone” series, so named because the Tribune deemed its inhabitants a “permanent underclass” and “millstone” draped around America’s neck: “A new class of people has taken root in America’s cities, a lost society dwelling in enclaves of despair and chaos that infect and threaten the communities at large… Its members don’t share traditional values of work, money, education, home and perhaps even of life. This is a class of misfits best known to more fortunate Americans as either victim or perpetrator in crime statistics.”

Fountain, who was a college student, and married with three children when the Tribune’s reporters and editors painted that single damnable perspective—and who, four years after that series, entered the Tribune’s newsroom as a staff writer—has always asserted that there was even back then another portrait the Tribune and American journalism historically have missed concerning hyper-segregated Black communities. FountainWorks’ Unforgotten Bureau and 50 Cent A Word endeavor to present the other side. We humbly seek donors willing to support our effort.