A. G. Gaston: The Black Business Titan Advancing African-American Entrepreneurship in Alabama

A. G. Gaston (b. 7/4/1892 - d. 1/19/1996)

When considering the incredible obstacles surmounted by A. G. Gaston and his outstanding business successes, one wonders why his legacy is not recounted and revered more in the books, journals and chronicles of Black history. A towering business figure in Alabama, Gaston overcame poverty and racial discrimination to build a multi-million dollar business empire in the heart of the South. You will respect his conglomerate when you learn that his enterprises included an insurance company, two cemeteries, a savings and loan bank, a business college, a couple radio stations, a motel, a construction company and multiple real estate holdings.

Arthur George Gaston was born in Demopolis, Alabama to Tom and Rosa McDonald Gaston. His father was a railroad worker who died soon after Gaston’s birth. His mother worked in Greensboro, Alabama as a family cook to the wealthy Jewish businessman A. B. Loveman, the founder of the largest department store in Alabama —Loveman’s of Alabama.  Gaston spent his early years in Demopolis with Joe and Idella Gaston, his paternal grandparents. It is reported that, while poor, his grandparent’s house was the only one with a swing — and opportunity the young, entrepreneurial Gaston used to charge the local children to ride the swing. By 1905, at the age of 13, Gaston would move back with his mother, this time to Birmingham, Alabama where she accompanied the relocated Loveman family.

Early Life in Birmingham

Gaston’s mother enrolled him in the Tuggle Institute when they arrived in Birmingham. The Tuggle Institute was a privately run charitable school for African American, the namesake of the social reformer Carrie Tuggle. The school was modeled after the Booker T. Washington industrial educational schools, which emphasized developing trade skills and small businesses. In fact, Booker T. Washington visited the Tuggle Institute on numerous occasions to give inspirational speeches to the students. Gaston was naturally influenced by the philosophy of “pulling ones self up by his or her boot straps”, which was the hallmark of Washington’s message. After completing the tenth grade, Gaston left the school and started working selling the black-owned newspaper founded by Oscar W. Adams in 1907, the Birmingham Reporter. The young Gaston also started working as a bellman at the Battle House Hotel in Mobile, Alabama. 

In 1913, Gaston enlisted in the U.S. Army and was assigned to the all-Black Ninety-second Infantry Division that was deployed in World War I combat in 1917. Of his $20 monthly military pay, it is reported that Gaston sent $15 home towards his first real estate mortgage investment in Birmingham. When he returned to Birmingham after the war, Gaston drove a delivery truck for a dry-cleaning company. He also worked in Fairfield, Alabama as a Tennessee Coal and Iron Company miner. While there, Gaston sold lunch sandwiches to his co-workers and eventually became a lending source to them.

The Booker T. Washington Burial Society & The Booker T. Washington Business College

By 1923 Gaston founded his first business, the Booker T. Washington Burial Society, the same year he married Creole Smith. While working in the coal mines, Gaston undoubtedly saw many early deaths from what we now recognize as harsh and unsafe working conditions in the mines. The need for poor Blacks to have affordable funeral burial services was not lost of Gaston, and as a result the fraternal order burial society was developed, along with the funeral services. Gaston attracted members from local church congregations, as well as his sponsorship of local radio programs aimed at African Americans. By 1932, Gaston has established the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company, which not only offered burial services, but also life insurance, health insurance and accident insurance. He would branch this business off into casket manufacturing and the operation of two cemeteries. In 1923, he entered a partnership with his father-in-law A. L. Smith and started the Smith & Gaston Funeral Home on real estate he bought and renovated near Kelly Ingram Park in downtown Birmingham. 

Booker T. Washington Business College in Alabama

By 1938, Gaston’s first wife Creole Smith Gaston died. In 1939, he married Minnie L. Gardner Gaston. Always one to recognize a market demand, he and his second wife founded the Booker T. Washington business school after noticing a shortage of skilled administrative staff in the community to operate his businesses. 

Growing His Alabama Black Businesses & Giving Back

Gaston continued expanding his empire. In the early 1950s, he responded to the difficulties African-Americans faced securing home loans from White-owned banks and opened the Citizens Federal Savings and Loan Association. This became the first Black-owned financial institution in Birmingham since the Alabama Penny Savings Bank closed 40 years earlier. Gaston also developed the Vulcan Realty and Investment Company. He started manufacturing, bottling and distributing a soda called Joe Louis Punch. He started the A. G. Gaston Home for Senior Citizens and the A. G. Gaston Motel. The motel, which became a refuge, met the great demand of African Americans traveling through the South during the 1950s where few White-owned hotels and restaurants welcomed Black people. Delving into media, Gaston also owned and operated two radio stations — WAGG-AM and WENN-FM — as well as provided public relation services for other businesses through S & G Public Relations Company. It was very clear that Gaston did not come to play with us. 

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Gaston gave back to the community. He donated $50,000 to establish the A. G. Gaston Boys Club in Birmingham. During the Birmingham civil rights movement In the 1960s, Gaston was sometimes criticized as being an accommodationist. It is not lost on history, however, that it was his wealth that was crucial to the achievement of the efforts of the civil rights movement. For example, Gaston provided civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. with reduced costs accommodations at his motel. When King was arrested in 1963, it was Gaston who bailed him out of jail. His support of the civil rights movement lead to his motel being bombed on May 12, 1963. His home was bombed in September 1963. In 1976, Gaston was kidnapped and tortured with a hammer before he was rescued by the police. 

Gaston has been bestowed with many honors. In 1975, he received an honorary law degree from Pepperdine University. Black Enterprise magazine named him “Entrepreneur of the Century in 1992. Gaston published his autobiography, Green Power: The Successful Way of A. G. Gaston in 1968. Read more about A. G. Gaston in the biography Black Titan, A. G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire. New York: One World, 2004. His goal was to inspire Black entrepreneurship. His powerful life and words should not be lost on the generations. 

Charlottes E. Ray: First African-American Woman Lawyer and First Woman Admitted to Practice Law Before the D.C. Supreme Court

Early Black Woman Attorney Charlotte E. Ray

On January 13, 1850, Charlotte E. Ray was born in New York City. She was one of seven children born to Charles Bennett Ray and Charlotte Augusta Ray (nia Burroughs). Her father was a minister, abolitionist and assisted Africans escaping U.S. slavery through passage on the Underground Railroad — a network of people assisting African refugees along the geographic passages that could ultimately lead to freedom.

An ardent student, Ray attended the Institution for the Education of Colored Youth in Washington D.C. In the late 1860s, Ray served as a teacher at a predatory school associated with Howard University. She would later apply for admission to Howard University law school using the name “C.E. Ray”. The school’s law program only admitted men. It is speculated that she used her initials to keep her gender a secret until acceptance.

Ultimately, Ray was admitted to law school and excelled in her studies, reportedly focusing on corporate law. One of her classmates described her as an “apt scholar,” according to the book Notable Black American Women. In 1872, Ray graduated from law school. On April 23, 1872, she was admitted to the bar of the District of Columbia. Her admission marked her as 1) the third woman in U.S. history to be admitted to practice law, 2) the first African-American female attorney in the country, and 3) the first women to be admitted to the D.C. bar and the first woman to be admitted to practice law before its Supreme Court. 

By 1873, Ray opened her own law office focusing on the area of law she excelled in, namely, commercial law. She advertised her legal services in newspapers such as the New National Era, a weekly newspaper published by Frederick Douglass — the only paper of its day published and edited by people of African descent. Douglass celebrated Ray’s graduation in his newspaper. In one published article, Douglass reports that Charlotte E. Ray is “the first colored lady in the world to graduate in law.”

While Ray served as a commercial lawyer, there is evidence that she was also active as a trial attorney. She was the first woman to practice and argue a case in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. On June 3, 1875, Ray submitted pleadings in the case of Gadley vs. Gadley, No. 4278, in the District of Columbia Supreme Court.  In this case, Ray represented a woman who was petitioning for a divorce against her husband for whom she charged physical domestic abuse and habitual drunkenness. 

As a solo practitioner who was both a woman and a person of African descent, it was difficult for Ray to get clients due to racism and gender discrimination. In fact, in 1875, only a couple years into Ray’s practice of law, the United States Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, made a decisive decision against women. The question before the Court was whether “since the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, a woman, who is a citizen of the United States and the State of Missouri, is a voter in that State, notwithstanding the provision of the constitution and laws of the State, which confine the right of suffrage to men alone.” The U.S. Supreme Court answered that question with a resounding no, a woman gained no rights to vote in such a situation. The respondent in that case, a female Missouri citizen, would gain no right to the franchise. The Happersett Court rejected the argument that a woman, born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction, is a citizen of the United States and of the State in which she resides, has the right to suffrage as one of the privileges and immunities of her citizenship, which no State constitution can abridge. 

This was the environment that Ray, a young Black woman practicing law, was face with in America. While Washington D.C. was one of the most diverse cities in the U.S., with a population of African Americans representing approximately a third of the capital city, after four years, Ray closed her law practice and moved to Brooklyn, New York. In N.Y.,  she worked as a public school teacher and became a member of the National Association of Colored Women. On January 4, 1911, at age 60, Charlotte E. Ray died in New York. On March 2006, The Northeastern University School of Law in Boston chapter of Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity International honored her legacy by naming their newly chartered chapter after her, in recognition of her place as the first female African American attorney in the United States. 

Dusé Mohamed Ali: An Early Influence on the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple of America

Dusé Mohamed Ali

Dusé Mohamed Ali (b. 11/21/1866 – d. 6/25/1945, Lagos, Nigeria) was born in Alexandria, Egypt to Abdul Salem Ali, an Egyptian army officer, and a Nubian mother who was a national of Sudan but whose name is unknown. In 1876, at the age of 10, a young Ali went to England with a French officer friend of his father for schooling. Six years later, Ali returned to Egypt to settle his father’s estate. In September 1882, Ali’s father died after serving in the Egyptian military against the British in the Battle of Tel el-Kebir in Kassassin, Canal Zone, Egypt. Ali soon thereafter return to England, spending most of his adult life outside of Egypt, traveling widely within pan-African communities in Great Britain, Nigeria and the United States. 

Before his father died, Ali intended to study as a doctor but subsequently decided that he wanted to act and write. After completing his studies at the University of London, Ali began to perform in London and the British Isles in such productions as Othello and the Merchant of Venice. Ali established a stage career as a touring Shakespearean actor, performing in North America and the British provinces. He wrote and produced various plays, including The Jew’s Revenge (1903), A Cleopatra Night (1907), and the musical comedy Lily of Bermuda (1909). In London, Ali founded the Hull Shakespeare Society.

His early fame as an international scholar occurred after he published a short history of Egypt, reportedly the first such work written by an indigenous Egyptian in modern times. The book, The Land of the Pharaohs, received critical acclaim when it was published in 1911. In its introduction, Ali states that he was inspired to undertake the historical account because of the “continual growth of misrepresentation in the English Press touching on Egyptian affairs.” He goes on to state that “Roosevelt Guildhall peroration has proved the last straw of a most weighty bundle” — referencing U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt’s speech on Great Britain and Africa at Guildhall in London. 

In Roosevelt’s1910 speech at Guildhall, he asserts that in Egypt, Britain’s treating all religions with fairness caused an anti-foreign movement in which “murder on a large or small scale is expected to play a leading part.” The British government’s response to the speech was to send Lord Kitchener to Egypt as Consul-General to suppress what was seen as a socialist tendency among the young Nationalist party in Egypt. The London Spectator reported on the Guildhall speech stating “We thank Mr. Roosevelt once again for giving us so useful a reminder of our duty.” It was these series of events that led Ali to embark on addressing the historical account in his book The Land of the Pharaohs.

Duse Mohamed Ali:
The Autobiography

Fleet Street Office in London of
African Times & Orient Review
(Columbia Digital Library Collection)

Also an avid community organizer, Ali founded the Anglo-Ottoman Society in London and the Indian Muslim Soldiers’ Widows’ and Orphans’ War Fund. He was active in the League of Justice of the Afro-Asian Nations and the African Progress Union, an association of West Indian and African exiles founded in London in 1913. In addition to community activism, Ali published works in the London-based weekly New Age, at the time edited by Alfred Richard Orange, writing articles on Egyptian nationalism and global pan-African oppression. 

In 1911, the First Universal Races Congress was held at the University of London for four days — 7/26/1911 to 7/29/1911 — featuring speakers from various countries to discuss how to improve race relations and how to combat racism impacting global African communities in the world. Ali helped with the arrangements for the even and met a number of the prominent West African merchants and professionals in attendance at the four-day event. With the help of Sierra Leone-born journalist John Eldred Jones, Ali soon thereafter published the first political journal produced by and for Black people — The African Times and Orient Review. This pan-African journal was launched as a monthly publication in June 1912, described as a “monthly devoted to the interests of the coloured races of the world.” The Oxford Companion to Black British History describes the journal as a “militant magazine” that was committed to the “exposure of various colonial injustices.” 

The August 1912 issue of the African Times and Orient Review included a letter by J.E. Casey Hayford titled “A Tribute From Africa”. Hayford was a Ghanaian lawyer, educator, writer and statesman, who would go on to led the first meeting of the National Congress of British West Africa in London in 1920. In 1911, Hayford had published the novel Ethiopia Unbound. By 1927, Hayford was elected to the Ghana Legislative Council. 

When the Jamaican-born Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr. arrived in Britian in 1912, he became closely associated with Ali. In fact, Ali would become a mentor to Garvey as a staff member of the African Times and Orient Review. Garvey never converted to Islam but it is said that he learned a number of the basic tenets of Islam from Ali. He also learned a lot from Ali about pan-Africanism, the struggle of African people around the world against European oppression. 

July 1912 Issue of the
African Times Orient Review

From July to December 1913, the London-based African Times Orient Review was published monthly. From March 24 to August 18, 1914, it was published weekly. By the time the Great War (World War I) broke out on July 28, 1914, the journal was banned by Britain in India and its African colonies. The British government reported Ali as a ‘notorious disseminator of sedition.” In November 1917, a British colonial official stated that “in the old days the magazine was considered to be of doubtful loyalty, owing to Duse Mohamed’s pan-Ethiopian programme.” The journal stopped publishing after October 1918. The Great War ended November 11, 1918. Ali’s publication was relaunched as Africa and Orient Review, publishing from January 1920 to December 1920. 

After closing the London-office of Africa and Orient Review in 1920, Ali would arrive in the United States at Michigan in 1921. In Detroit, he founded the Universal Islamic Society. He never returned back to Britain. In the U.S., Ali worked with Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) movement based in Harlem, New York. He was a contributing writer for the UNIA’s Negro World publication and is noted as the head of its Africa section. In July 1921, Ali traveled to Nigeria and was welcomed at the Shitta Mosque at Lagos but would soon return back to the United States. In 1922, wearing his characteristic fez hat, Ali made many appearances among Detroit’s Black Muslim community. It is often speculated that Ali’s presence in Detroit impacted W. D. Fard Muhammad’s development of the Nation of Islam out of Detroit, which was founded in 1930. He may have also had a relationship with Noble Drew Ali and the rise of the Moorish Science Temple of America. The Moorish Science Temple of America, is reported to have been established in the United States as early as 1913. There is undoubtedly a lot of room for scholarship in this area. By June 1928, a final single journal issue is reported to have been published By Ali in New York under the title “Africa”. 

In 1931, Ali is reported to have returned to Lagos to watch over business interests in the cocoa industry. He settled in Lagos, and was appointed editor of the Nigerian Daily Times. On October 3, 1932, Ali produced the play A Daughter of Pharaoh in the Glover Memorial Hall in Lagos. He also became the editor of the Daily Telegraph in Nigeria. By July 1933, he launched The Comet, a weekly newspaper in Lagos. On June 25, 1945, at the age of 78, Ali died in the African Hospital in Lagos after a protracted illness. He is buried at the Okesuna Muslim Cemetery in Nigeria. 

Carlos Alexander Cooks and the Development of Black Nationalism

It is likely that you have never heard of Carlos Alexander Cooks, though he has profoundly shaped the development of Black Nationalism in the U.S. Cooks was born in the Dominican Republic, Caribbean on 6/23/1913 to James Henry Cooks and Alice Cooks. His parents were originally from the neighboring island of St. Martin.

Descriptzto James Henry Cooks and Alice Cooks, who were originally from the neighboring island of St. Martin. His education took place mostly in Santo Domingo until moving to New York in 1929 where he went on to higher learning.

Cooks’ intellect was recognized from an early age. He attended the leadership school in the Voodoo Sacré Society. He became involved in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), where both his father and uncle were among the many St. Martiners who were members of the organization led by Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr. 

Cooks went on join the Garvey Union and its Universal African Legion. Marcus Garvey played a central role in shaping Cooks’ political career. At age nineteen, Cooks was knighted by Garvey, becoming an official and active member of the UNIA. In the years between Garvey's death (1940) and the appearance of Malcolm X in Harlem (1954) Cooks was one of the most important Black nationalist figures in Harlem and the United States. In fact, after Marcus Garvey was deported, Carlos Cooks led the Advance Division of the UNIA. 

Black Nationalism from Garvey to Malcolm

On 6/23/1941, on his birthday, Cooks would found the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement (ANPM). Born out of Garvey's UNIA, Cooks envisioned the ANPM as "an educational, inspirational, instructive, constructive and expansive society... composed of people desirous of bringing about a progressive, dignified, cultural, fraternal and racial confraternity among the African peoples of the world.” On the streets of Harlem in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, the ANPM kept the spirit of the UNIA alive, capturing the political pulse of the Black Nationalist community.

In September 1941, months after Cooks founded the ANPM,  writer Jane Cooke Wright wrote the following in the New York Age newspaper: “The Honorable Carlos Cooks, an important character in the advance division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, exemplifies the views of Marcus Garvey. He preaches the supremacy of the Blacks. This wishful thinking, he believes will someday come true. At present the white people in Europe are killing each other off and therefore the final battle will be between the whites and the Blacks on the sands of Africa.”

Cooks was committed to Black economic achievement. It is said that it was Cooks who coined the phrase “BUY BLACK” as an economic solution in African-American communities across the U.S. On 5/5/1966, Cooks died in Harlem New York at the age of 52.