As fate would have it, the nominal wealth of most of the individuals profiled in this book faded after their deaths. Yet their legacies endure.
Mary Ellen Pleasant left a large estate worth nearly $300,000 ($8.4 million) when she died, but she had no heirs to bequeath her fortune to. Her only daughter, Lizzie J. Smith, died when she was a young woman in San Francisco, years before her mother. Pleasant’s estate was consumed by her numerous creditors and complainants after she died in 1904.
Robert Reed Church left hundreds of his residential properties in the Beale Street District of Memphis to the children of his first marriage, Mary Church Terrell and Thomas Ayers Church. At the time of their inheritance, the values of these properties were declining, due in part to Beale Street itself, which was once again being maligned as a black slum and vice district. Mary and Thomas thrived despite their diminished inheritance. Mary became a teacher and a prominent suffragette and civil rights activist. Thomas became a lawyer and publisher.
Robert Reed Church left the bulk of his liquid assets to his second wife, Anna Church, and their children, Annette Church and Robert Reed Church Jr., who used their father’s bequest to maintain the family’s commercial property business on Beale Street. Church Jr. leased property to clubs and concert halls, as Beale Street became the mecca of blues music, eventually serving as a launching pad for W. C. Handy and B. B. King. In doing so, he was part of establishing the black entertainment industry, which today is responsible for the majority of black America’s very richest entrepreneurs, including Oprah Winfrey, Bob Johnson, Sean Combs, Tyler Perry, and Cathy Hughes. Church Jr. died in 1952, leaving one daughter, Sara Roberta Church. When she died in 1995, after a career working as an administrator for the federal government, she was the last known surviving direct descendant of Robert Reed Church Sr.
O. W. Gurley had most of his wealth destroyed in the fires and violence of the Tulsa race riots in 1921. Afterward, he moved to a four-bedroom house in South Los Angeles and opened a small hotel that he operated with his wife, Emma. Gurley was never able to rebuild his wealth to the level it had reached in Tulsa. The couple had no children and left a modest estate to their extended family members.
Hannah Elias disappeared from public life after she moved to Europe. What she did after she expatriated is still a mystery. Nonetheless, her most notable achievement was in helping convert Harlem into a black mecca. Today, Harlem remains one of America’s most prominent black neighborhoods.
When Annie Malone died of a stroke in 1954, she left behind a diminished estate worth approximately $100,000 ($906,888), coming after years of expenses from the management fees of her company and an expensive divorce from Aaron Malone. As she had no children, her estate was split between her nieces and nephews.
Many of the industries these men and women pioneered are still relevant today. Real estate, which played a role in the development of the fortunes of almost all the dynamic personalities in this book, is still an outsize component of African American wealth. Since Reconstruction, black people have, on average as a group, invested a larger percentage of their net worth in real estate than any other group. There may be many economic and social reasons for this, but perhaps one in particular is that for African Americans, owning one’s land, after toiling tirelessly over it as enslaved farmers and then sharecroppers, is an affirmation of liberation. That being said, the 2008 financial crisis dealt a blow to this economic tradition, as African Americans were disproportionately affected by both the fraudulent lending practices that helped create the crisis and the foreclosures that resulted. Today, the black home ownership rate is around 43 percent, nearly the lowest for African Americans in modern history.
Madam C. J. Walker’s and Annie Malone’s businesses created the black hair and beauty industry, which today is worth nearly $700 million. Surprisingly, the black hair industry today is not dominated by African American companies, or even any American companies, but rather by foreign firms. South Korean and Chinese companies that manufacture products like wigs, hair extensions, and chemical straighteners dominate the black hair sector. The trend, however, may be reversing, as more black women are choosing to wear their hair “natural,” just as Annie Malone advocated more than 130 years ago.
Mary Ellen Pleasant and Jeremiah Hamilton were pioneers as black stock and commodity traders. They paved the way for investors like Robert F. Smith, who today is one of America’s most successful investors and is worth nearly $3 billion. African Americans have historically underinvested in the markets, due in no small part to the legacy of Jim Crow–era “black bans” on Wall Street, which early black investors like Jeremiah Hamilton, Mary Ellen Pleasant, and my great-great-uncle John Mott Drew had to circumvent just to get in the game. In recent years, the racial investment gap has been closing. Despite this progress, black investment managers are still underrepresented, with only a little over 1 percent of all assets in the United States being managed by black brokers and firms.
During their lives, Mary Ellen Pleasant, Robert Reed Church, Ottawa W. Gurley, Annie Malone, Hannah Elias, and Madam C. J. Walker were pioneers and inspirations to other African Americans and their allies, while to others they were upenders of a racist social order. Slavery and Jim Crow were not just social atrocities, but also economic institutions meant to create a marginally compensated black labor class. As enslaved African Americans became paid tenant farmers after Emancipation, their wages were garnished by plantation owners. Blacks who managed to own their farms faced constant racial harassment and threats from white supremacist groups. African American inventors were often denied patents or had their intellectual property stolen. The black wealthy class perhaps represented the greatest affront to the racist economic systems of the slave and Jim Crow eras. It is perhaps for this reason that the six individuals in this book faced assassination attempts, mob violence, threats, libel, and slander. Yet they persevered to contribute to their communities and bring about some of America’s proudest moments, such as the abolition of slavery, the suffrage of women, and the establishment of some of the country’s most important cities and industries. These individuals’ lives demonstrate that wealth can be used as a powerful resource for change in the right hands, if people are so willing.
The stories of the first black millionaires in America are the beginning of an epic that is still unfolding—the journey from enslavement to economic and social equality. Their unlikely lives provided a spark for a people just beginning to lift themselves out of bondage and still serve as inspiration for minorities and women as they strive for greater financial empowerment today.