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. 

Book Available on Amazon

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. 

Reginald F. Lewis: Wall Street Lawyer and Financier, Entrepreneur and Philanthropist

Reginald F. Lewis (b. 12/7/1942 - d. 1/19/1993)

Reginald Francis Lewis was born in Baltimore, Maryland on December 7, 1942. Lewis' father was Clinton Lewis, a small business owner, and his mother was Carolyn Cooper, a teacher. By age 9, his mother and father were divorced and his mother was remarrying to a local postal worker, Jean Fugett, Sr.

The young Reginald Lewis showed a penchant for entrepreneurial endeavors early in life. By age 9, Lewis began selling newspapers within his Baltimore community, earning $20 a week in the early 1950s. According to the inflation calculator at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that is the equivalent of about $200 a week -- no small amount for the times and for a young man his age.

Lewis loved sports. A quarterback on the local football team, he won a football scholarship to Virginia State College a Historically Black College and University in Petersburg, Virginia. In 1965, he graduated with a B.A. in Economics. In his autobiography, Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?, he admits to not having made the best grades at Virginia State, but that same year he decided he wanted to go to law school. His admissions to law school is the kind of story from which legends are made, worthy of retelling.

In essence, without a formal application to Harvard Law School, Lewis traveled to the school and convinced the university's administration to provide him admission. After a visit to the campus, his legendary charisma won over the school's decision makers. He was told to submit the application later. It was a good investment for Harvard Law School. In fact, Lewis would donate $3 million dollars to the school in 1992 -- making him then the largest individual donor in the school's history.

Autobiography available at Amazon. 

By 1968, Lewis had graduated from Harvard Law School and was headed to New York City -- Wall Street, in fact. He soon began working as a lawyer at Paul Weiss Rifkin Wharton and Garrison. By the early 1970s, he had opened his own law firm, Lewis and Clarkson. The law partnership specialized in venture capital project.

By the 1980s, Reginald Lewis' legal and business acumen in venture capital projects translated over to corporate takeovers. He would leave the practice of law to pursue business ventures full-time. This change in career direction would eventually earn him a distinction as the richest African American man in the 1980s.

Through a $23 million buyout, by 1983, Lewis had acquired McCall Pattern Company, a well respected dress-pattern firm. He sold the company four years later for $63 million in cash. With only $1 million of his own money invested in the original takeover, his profit from the sell was $50 million, reported the New York Times.

Lewis acquired The Beatrice Companies in 1987, a foods company with large operations in Europe. This deal cost him $985 million dollars. He formed all of his food business concerns under the umbrella of TLC Beatrice International, with TLC standing for The Lewis Company. At the time, it was the largest firm run by a person of African descent. The global conglomerates under his operations included 64 companies that operated in 31 countries. Food interests ranged from an ice cream making company in Germany to a sausage production house in Spain.

It was a great investment for Lewis. TLC Beatrice would make Fortune's 500 list with a valuation of $1.5 billion. A read of Reginald Lewis' autobiography illustrates, however, that his successes were not without challenges. For example, in 1991, when he attempted to take TLC Beatrice Foods public through a stock offering, the market was not receptive.

Before his death on January 19, 1993, at the young age of only 50 years, Lewis had donated millions of dollars to various institutions, from churches to homeless shelters. The Abyssinian Baptist Church and Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity were both large recipients of his philanthropy. He held faithful memberships. He also donated to the HBCUs Virginia State College and Howard University.

He knew he had a tumor for about two months before he died, said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a close friend to Lewis. "He spent the last two months preparing for treatment," said Jackson, "and getting his whole house in order, in terms of the company and his family."

Lewis was survived by his wife, Loida Lewis, and two daughters, Christina and Leslie. His transition plan including leaving the running of his companies substantially to his half-brother, Jean S. Fugett, also a trained lawyer.

Mr. Lewis' name will certainly be remembered for generations to come. In Baltimore, to keep this great legacy alive there are both the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of African American History and Culture and the Reginald F. Lewis School of Business and Law High School. Harvard University constructed The Reginald F. Lewis International Law Center at the university's campus and also offers the Reginald F. Lewis Fellowship for Law Teaching. 

Annie Turnbo Malone: A Black Philanthropist and Entrepreneur

Photo of Annie Turnbo Malone 

(1869-1957)

Before Oprah Winfrey and Madame C.J. Walker, there was Annie Turnbo Malone (aka Annie Minerva Turnbo Pope Malone and Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone), an African American entrepreneur and philanthropist during the early 20th century. Malone is recorded as the U.S.'s first Black woman millionaire based on reports of $14 million in assets held in 1920 from her beauty and cosmetic enterprises, headquartered in St. Louis and Chicago.

Early Life of Annie Turnbo

On August 9, 1869, Robert Turnbo and Isabella Cook became parents to Annie in Metropolis, Illinois. Annie attended school in Illinois where she apprentenced with her sister as a hairdresser. By 1889, Malone had developed her own scalp and hair products that she demonstrated and sold from a buggy throughout Illinois.

Launches the "Poro" Brand in St. Louis, MO

Image of Poro College, St. Louis

By 1902, Malone's business growth led her to St. Louis, Missouri, which at the time held the fourth largest population of African Americans. In St. Louis she copyrighted her Poro brand beauty products. In 1914, in a St. Louis wedding, Malone married the school principal Aaron Eugene Malon.

Photo of Poro College Administrative Building

By 1917, Malone opened the doors of Poro College, a beauty college which was later attended by Madam C.J. Walker. The school reportedly graduated about 75,000 agents world-wide, including the Caribbean. By 1930, the first full year of the Great Depression, Malone had moved from Missouri after divorcing her second husband and settled on Chicago's South Side.

The Black Philanthropist

From 1919 to 1943, Malone served as board president of the St. Louis Colored Orphan's Home.  She had donated the first $10,000 to build the orphanage's new building in 1919. During the 1920s, Malone's philanthropy included financing the education of two full-time students in every historically black college and university. Her $25,000 donation to Howard University was among the largest gifts the university had received by a private donor of African descent.

Photo of Annie Turnbo Malone

On May 10, 1957, Annie Turnbo Malone was treated for a stroke at Provident Hospital in Chicago where she died. At the time of her death Poro beauty colleges were in operation in more than thirty U.S. cities.

Dr. Theodore Kenneth Lawless: Dermatologist, Businessman, and Philanthropist

Photo: Dr. Theodore K. Lawless (b. Dec. 6, 1892 - d. May 1, 1971)

Dr. Theodore Kenneth "T.K." Lawless had an extensive knowledge of dermatology that made him one of the leading international skin specialists of his time.

EARLY LIFE AND TRAINING

He was born to Rev. Alfred Lawless and Harriet Dunn Lawless in Thibodeaux, Louisiana in 1892. Lawless became a committed philanthropist after completing extensive academic studies and achieving worldwide success in his medical practice.

He attended Talladega College in 1914 where he earned his B.A. In 1919, he obtained an M.D. from Northwestern University School of Medicine, and an M.A. in 1920 from Northwestern University. He studied dermatology at Columbia University in 1920 and attended Harvard University in 1921.

From 1921-22, Lawless studied at the University of Paris. From 1922-23, he studied at the University of Freiburg, and from 1923-24 he studied at the University of Vienna. He became a noted lecturer in the Department of Dermatology at Northwestern University in Chicago. He was also once a professor of physiology at Howard Medical School.

MEDICAL PRACTICE

Dr. Lawless created Chicago's largest and most respected dermatology clinics in the heart of the African American community. Patients came from across the nation for his coveted services. The clinics where located in the T.K. Lawless Professional Building, located at 4300 S. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive.

Photo: T.K. Lawless Professional Buiding in Chicago at 4300 S. King Drive

His medical research contributed greatly towards establishing a cure to leprosy. His knowledge in dermatology and in the treatment of syphilis were used by both U.S. and European physicians. He served as a consultant to the U.S. Chemical Warfare Board. During World War II, he served on the Advisory Committee on venereal disease.

Dr. Lawless donated a research laboratory to Provident Hospital on the South Side of Chicago. A clinic in Israel was named after him to honor his $160,000 financial donations toward establishing a dermatology clinic (Lawless Department of Dermatology) at the Beilinson Hospital in Tel-Aviv, Israel. In 1954, Lawless was awarded the Spingarn Medal, the highest ranking NAACP award. By the 1960s, Ebony magazine listed Dr. Lawless among America's 35 Negro millionaires.