Arthur George Gaston
July 4, 1892 – January 19, 1996
Entrepreneur and a community leader. and civil rights activist a black multimillionaire businessman in Alabama who used his money and influence in the cause of civil rights and shrugged off accusations that he was an Uncle Tom
Arthur was born on July 4, 1892, in Demopolis, Alabama to Tom and Rosa McDonald Gaston. His father was a railroad worker and his mother a cook. When he was a teenager, the entire family moved to the booming industrial city of Birmingham, Alabama. His mother went to work for A. B. Loveman, a wealthy Jewish department store owner. He was raised by his former slave grandparents Joseph and Idella Gaston. In 1905 Arthur Gaston moved to Birmingham where he attended the Tuggle Institute for black children. In 1910 he joined the army and during World War I served overseas in France. After his honorable discharge from the military, Gaston worked for Tennessee Coal and Iron Company in Fairfield, Alabama. While employed at the mine, Gaston became an entrepreneur, selling meals and affordable burial insurance to the black community.
In the late 1930s, he opened an insurance company and funeral home across from Kelly Ingram Park in downtown Birmingham in partnership with his father-in-law. The company name was the Smith & Gaston Funeral Home, in 1938. Smith & Gaston sponsored gospel music programs on local radio stations and launched a quartet of its own. As his insurance business grew, he diversified his financial services by opening the state’s only black-owned savings and loan in the early 1950s. . In 1954 Gaston opened A.G. Gaston Motel near his other businesses to welcome black visitors turned away from hotels that practiced Jim Crow segregation. Before the close of the decade, he employed the largest number of African Americans in the state and he had become one of the wealthiest African Americans in the United States. His only competition in that specific business was S. B. Fuller hi main business rival during the 1950s and 1960s.. His father-in-law Mr. Smith had been an active supporter of voting rights and his second wife was a founder of the National Council of Negro Women and an avid advocate for education reform, Gaston himself kept a low political profile through most of the 1940s and 1950s, Gaston’s wealth and cordial ties with the white elite gave him a certain amount of clout that others did not have. His favorite methods were quiet negotiation, deal-making, and, if necessary, private threats. He was often effective. For example, the “White’s Only” signs on the drinking fountains of the First National Bank came down after Gaston threatened to pull his account. Many have forgotten the extent to which blacks were exerting economic pressure successfully to bring integration in the decade before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Gaston supported 100% the civil rights movement financially. He offered to donate money to the legal team of Autherine Lucy, an African American who in 1955 had filed a lawsuit to integrate the graduate school at the University of Alabama. He also gave financial assistance to Tuskegee activists forced out of their homes because they challenged voting discrimination.
In 1956 when Birmingham civil rights activist Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, the organization held its initial meeting at Gaston’s downtown office. Gaston also allowed activists to lodge at his hotel and meet there to plan campaigns. During the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations at Kelly Ingram Park, Gaston used his financial resources of to bail out of jail Martin Luther King, Jr. and other incarcerated activists.
Gaston himself became the victim of violence as a result of his support for King and Abernathy when his motel was bombed on May 12, 1963. In September 1963 following the release of Dr. Martin Luther King , Gaston’s home was bombed but no one was injured and the house suffered minimal damage. In 1976, Gaston was again the victim of violence when he was kidnapped by an intruder, beaten with a hammer, handcuffed, and driven around the city for hours before the assailant was apprehended by police; the incident was thought to be prompted more by his financial status rather than simply his race.
In 1968, Gaston published his autobiography, Green Power: The Successful Way of A. G. Gaston, motivated in large part by his desire to promote black entrepreneurship and to regain respect in the black community. The book was well received and earned Gaston an appearance on The Today Show. In 1975, he received an honorary law degree from Pepperdine University. In 1976, he was named an honorary president of Troy University and the Alabama Broadcasters Association named him its citizen of the year.
Gaston was also honored by serving on the boards of trustees of Tuskegee University, Daniel Payne College, the Gorgas Scholarship Foundation, and the Eighteenth Street Branch YMCA. In 1992, he was named by the magazine Black Enterprise as “Entrepreneur of the Century.” Gaston gave back to the community in numerous ways, including donating $50,000 to establish the A. G. Gaston Boys Club in Birmingham and serving as its president.
He also served on the boards of directors for the Jefferson County United Appeal, the Jefferson County Mental Health Association, the National Business League, Operation New Birmingham, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In 1986, Gaston added to his empire at the age of 94 with the A. G. Gaston Construction Company. The next year, Gaston rewarded his long-time employees by creating an employee stock option plan and sold the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company with assets totaling $34 million in assets to his employees for only $3.5 million. Gaston continued to operate the Citizens Federal Savings Bank and the Smith and Gaston
Funeral Home in the 1990s despite suffering a stroke in 1992. Gaston, one of Alabama’s leading entrepreneurs, died on January 19, 1996, at the age of 103 at the Medical Center East Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. He had left behind the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company, the A.G. Gaston Construction Company, the A.G. Gaston Boys and Girls Club, and CFS Bancshares, the nation’s second-largest black-owned bank. he had amassed a fortune estimated with a fortune worth well over $130 million. His first wife, Creola, died many years ago. A son, A. G. Gaston Jr., died in 1973. Surviving are his wife of some 50 years, Minnie; five grandchildren; six great-grandchildren, and many nieces and nephews. The City of Birmingham owns the motel, which it plans to make into an annex to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, built on the former site of the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company.
Encyclopedia of Alabama
Birmingham, Alabama Archives
Black Titan A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black
Millionaire
Gaston, A. G. Green Power: The Successful Way of A. G.
Gaston. 1968. Reprint, Troy, Ala.: Troy State University
Press, 1977.
Wikipedia