Black Titan: A. G. Gaston and the Making of a Black Millionaire.

• Author: Beito, David T.
• Position: Book review

Black Titan: A. G. Gaston and the Making of a Black Millionaire

By Carol Jenkins and Elizabeth Gardner Hines New York: One World/Ballantine Books, 2003. Pp. 336. $24.95 cloth, $14.95 paperback.

By the 1960s, Arthur G. Gaston was probably the richest black man in America. He was the leading employer of blacks in Alabama and directly and indirectly gave substantial aid and comfort to the civil rights movement. In the decade after the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. and his allies used the A. G. Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Alabama, as a safe refuge to plan their activities. When Eugene "Bull" Connor, the notorious commissioner of public safety, had King arrested in 1963, Gaston put up the $160,000 bail money from his own pocket.

Despite these contributions, Gaston's name does not appear in three main survey texts of black history: Darlene Clark Hines's The African-American Odyssey (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 2005); Joe William Trotter Jr.'s The African-American Experience (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2000); and John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994). All three compound their neglect by failing to mention other leading black entrepreneurs, such as the remarkable S. B. Fuller, Gaston's main business rival during the 1950s and 1960s.

In writing Black Titan, a full-length biography, Carol Jenkins (Gaston's niece) and Elizabeth Gardner Hines (his grandniece) have taken an important step toward making up for these omissions. Moreover, they show how Gaston was both a product of and a direct participant in a long tradition of black engagement in business, self-help, and mutual aid.

Born in 1893, Gaston grew up in poverty in the small town of Demopolis, Alabama. He was the son of a manual railroad worker and a cook for a prominent white family. 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.

As is true for most entrepreneurs, Gaston's rise up the economic ladder can be traced to a combination of luck and pluck. The connection to the Loveman family nurtured a favorable environment for a future business career. Loveman stood out as a model of how to prosper through long hours of hard work and careful attention to investments. The philanthropies of his wife, Minnie Loveman, were instrumental in Gaston's decision to enroll as a student at the Tuggle Institute.

The institute's organizational founder and chief sponsor was the Order of Calanthe, the women's auxiliary of the Colored Knights of Pythias. Among black...