The incredible untold story of America's first Black millionaires, formerly enslaved people who overcame great hardships to accumulate and preserve their wealth for a century, from the Jacksonian era to the Roaring '20s. These self-made businesspeople achieved the success that paralleled that of American business legends like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison.
Despite being among the estimated 35,000 Black billionaires in the country today, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Michael Jordan, and Will Smith were not the first Black people to enter the illustrious 1 percent. As the final generation of Blacks born into slavery was nearing adulthood between the years of 1830 and 1927, a tiny minority of intelligent,
Men and women who were tenacious and courageous blazed new ground to achieve the pinnacles of financial achievement.
A fascinating look at these extraordinary people, including Napoleon Bonaparte, is presented in Black Fortunes. Drew, the great-great-great-grandfather of the author Shomari Wills, was the first Black man to possess the land in Powhatan County (modern-day Richmond) in post-Civil War Virginia. Five more unidentified Black businesspeople, including the following:
Mary Ellen Pleasant, who supported abolitionist John Brown's cause with her Gold Rush fortune
Robert Reed Church, who grew to be Tennessee's greatest landowner
Hannah Elias, the mistress of a wealthy from New York City, established an empire in Harlem using the land her lover provided her.
Annie Turnbo-Malone, an orphan and self-taught chemist, created the first national line of hair care products.
O. W. Gurley, a Mississippi schoolteacher, who transformed a section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, into a "town" for wealthy Black professionals and craftsmen that became known as "the Black Wall Street," Madam C. J. Walker, a Turnbo-employee Malone's who would gain the moniker "America's first female Black millionaire"
Black Fortunes exposes the advent of the Black economic titan and a new, little-known chapter in the history of the country that combines the themes of Hidden Figures, Titan, and The Tycoons.
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