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  • Black Titan: A. G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire
  • W. Thomas White
Carol Jenkins and Elizabeth Gardner Hines. Black Titan: A. G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire. New York: One World (Ballantine Book), 2004. xv + 320 pp. ISBN 0-345-45347-6, $24.95.

Our historical literature of African Americans in the twentieth century has focused overwhelmingly on political figures, civil rights leaders, novelists, and others. That is all to the good. However, business leaders, by comparison, have suffered relative neglect. This full-length biography of Arthur G. Gaston, one of the truly preeminent black entrepreneurs of the twentieth century, is therefore an important contribution. Carol Jenkins, formerly an Emmy Award–winning anchor at WNBC-TV in Manhattan, is Gaston's niece, while her daughter and coauthor, Elizabeth Hines, is a Ph.D. candidate in English language and literature at Harvard University. Despite their familial relationships, however, this fine study is not an exercise in hagiography.

Gaston was born in poverty in 1892 in rural Jim Crow Alabama, and his rise to fame and riches is on one level the stuff of inspiration. By the time of his death in 1996, Gaston had built an empire valued at $140 million by providing a host of services to the black community in his Birmingham, Alabama, home and elsewhere. His success, wide-ranging activities, generous philanthropic contributions, and sheer longevity (he lived to 103) spanned the twentieth century and placed him in the center of the civil rights movement of post–World War II America.

The authors chronicle Gaston's early years, which profoundly influenced his life. Little is known of his father, who died when Gaston was quite young. His mother, Rosie, played a pivotal role in his upbringing. A single mother, she found work as a cook in nearby Birmingham. Her employer, A. B. Loveman of Hungarian Jewish ancestry, was a self-made man who owned the city's principal department store and served as an inspirational example to the young Gaston, whom Rosie was able to bring to the city by 1905. There, he acquired a tenth grade education at the Tuggle Institute and was profoundly affected by the teachings (and frequent visits) of Booker T. Washington, whose teachings informed Tuggle's philosophy of education. Indeed, the first book Gaston read was Washington's Up from Slavery. Gaston's teen years included a series of odd jobs. During that time he fathered his first child, Upton A. G. Gaston, Jr., whose mother raised him in Detroit until Gaston brought the lad to join him in Birmingham in the 1920s.

As soon as he could, Gaston enlisted in the Army and, subsequently, saw service in France during World War I. Returning home in 1919, he [End Page 192]faced the hostile world in which lynchings, general antiblack prejudice, and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan all were on the rise. Although he married Creola Smith, he was forced to scramble to earn a living in this hostile environment. Fired from his first job for his representation of workers asking for a raise, Gaston found work in the harsh environment of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company's mines.

There, he began his rise, selling lunches and providing small loans to fellow black miners at 25 percent interest. More important, he devised a succession of what became burial insurance companies, modeled on those of fraternal organizations. With his father-in-law, "Dad" Smith, he started a company that provided funeral services for the black community. Subsequently, he weathered the Great Depression, partially by buying scrip from Birmingham's teachers. During the 1930s, he was widowed when Creola, who had been in poor health for years, died prematurely.

By the end of the decade Gaston involved himself in still new ventures, including the founding of the Booker T. Washington Business College to train hundreds for staff positions in businesses and government during World War II. In 1943, he married his second wife, Minnie Gardner, who became director of the college and an important advocate for educational issues in Alabama and Washington, D.C. Even more new ventures followed after the war, as Gaston...

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