To honor Black history, take a look back at three African-American trailblazers who made an impact in the financial services industry:
In 1953, Ernesta Procope founded E.G. Bowman Co., Inc. an insurance broker in Brooklyn, N.Y. She became known as the “The First Lady of Wall Street” after she relocated the business to Wall Street in 1979. That historic move made her insurance brokerage firm the first and largest Black-owned and woman-owned business on Wall Street. Her company grew to become the largest minority-owned insurance company in the United States and is still in business. E.G. Bowman Company, Inc. assembled a corporate client base that included American Express Co., Philip Morris Cos., Tiffany & Co., Avon Products Inc., and RJR Nabisco Inc. She recently died on November 30, 2021, at the age of ninety-eight.[1]
In 1905, Alonzo Herndon founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, which is still one of the largest Black financial institutions in the United States. A former slave and sharecropper, he became a barber and eventually opened his own elite barbershop called the Crystal Palace. History chronicles that Herndon owned three barbershops and one hundred properties in Atlanta. He became Atlanta’s first African American millionaire.[2]
Millionaire entrepreneur A. G. Gaston was born on July 4, 1892, in Demopolis, Alabama. He graduated from the Tuggle Institute in Birmingham. In 1923, he started the Booker T. Washington Insurance Co. with $500. Building on the insurance company, Gaston developed a business empire estimated at more than $30 million, which included a funeral home, hotel, and a bank.[3]
Text republished from this blog post: https://blog.nationallife.com.mcas.ms/building-together-for-a-more-equitable-future/
[1] New Georgia Encyclopedia, “Alonzo Herndon,” by Alexa Henderson, modified July 14, 2020.
[2] The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, “Gaston, Arthur George,” Martin Luther King, Jr. Encyclopedia, 2022.
[3] Bloomberg, “Ernesta Procope, the “First Lady of Wall Street” Dies as 98,” by Laurence Arnold, December 9, 2021.