The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Weems
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Large Body ◽  
American Business ◽  
Insurance Company ◽  
Life Insurance Company ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Apparent Reason

Anthony Overton is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most significant African American entrepreneurs. Overton, at his peak, presided over a Chicago-based financial empire that included a personal care products company (Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company) a bank (Douglass National Bank), an insurance company (Victory Life Insurance Company) a popular periodical (the Half-Century Magazine), and a newspaper (Chicago Bee). This impressive business portfolio contributed to Overton being the first businessman to win the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1927, as well as him currently being acknowledged in the Harvard University Business School’s database of “American Business Leaders of the Twentieth Century” as the first African American to head a major business conglomerate. Nevertheless, despite Overton’s noteworthy entrepreneurial accomplishments, he remains a mysterious figure. The most readily apparent reason for this is the unavailability of his business records and personal papers. Still, because of Anthony Overton’s prominence, a large body of scattered alternative primary and secondary sources were available to construct this biography. Along with examining Anthony Overton and his accomplishments, this book places his activities in the context of larger societal occurrences in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Moreover, by recounting Overton’s life story, this biography seeks to more fully illuminate the role of business and entrepreneurship in the African American experience.

Racial Desegregation and Black Chicago Business

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Weems
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Life Insurance ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Insurance Companies ◽  
American Business ◽  
Insurance Company ◽  
Life Insurance Company ◽  
Vested Interests ◽  
Racial Desegregation

Using Edward Franklin Frazier’s important 1947 essay “Human, All Too Human: How Some Negroes Have Developed Vested Interests in the System of Racial Segregation” as a reference point; this chapter examines how racial desegregation affected two black Chicago insurance companies, the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company and Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company. Frazier predicted that if racial segregation were eliminated, it would ultimately result in the decline and disappearance of African American enterprises. As the evidence indicates, Professor Frazier proved to be a fairly accurate prophet in this regard. Some of the city’s long-standing African American firms, including the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company and the Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company, have, indeed, been removed from the landscape of American business.

The Business Life of Emmett Jay Scott

2003 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 667-686 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maceo Crenshaw Dailey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Insurance Company ◽  
Clearing House ◽  
Howard University ◽  
Black Entrepreneurs ◽  
Trading Firm ◽  
Black Township

Emmett Jay Scott was private secretary to Booker T. Washington and later became secretary treasurer of Howard University. He was involved in numerous business activities, ranging from the establishment of the National Negro Business League to the founding of an investment clearing-house, an insurance company, and an overseas trading firm. Scott also promoted the black township of Mound Bayou and backed African American entertainment enterprises. His business activities were largely unheralded, and the frustrations he encountered illustrate both the obstacles and the opportunities for black entrepreneurs in the first half of the twentieth century.

John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon K. Winford
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Business ◽  
Insurance Company ◽  
Life Insurance Company ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Secondary Sources

This work combines black business and civil rights history to explain how economic concerns shaped the goals and objectives of the black freedom struggle. Brandon K. Winford examines the “black business activism” of banker and civil rights lawyer John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978). Born on the campus of Kittrell College in Vance County, North Carolina, he came of age in Jim Crow Atlanta, Georgia, where his father became an executive with the world-renowned North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (NC Mutual). As president of Mechanics and Farmers Bank (M&F Bank), located on Durham’s “Black Wall Street,” Wheeler became the Tar Heel State’s most influential black power broker and among the top civil rights figures in the South. Winford places Wheeler at the center of his narrative to understand how black business leaders tackled civil rights while continuously pointing to the economy’s larger significance for the success and advancement of the postwar New South. In this way, Wheeler articulated a bold vision of regional prosperity, grounded in full citizenship and economic power for black people. He reminded the white South that its future was inextricably linked to the plight of black southerners. He spent his entire career trying to fulfill these ideals through his institutional and organizational affiliations, as part and parcel of his civil rights agenda. Winford draws on previously unexamined primary and secondary sources, including newspapers, business records, FBI reports, personal papers, financial statements, presidential files, legal documents, oral histories, and organizational and institutional records.

Part of the Times, Personally and Professionally

2019 ◽  
pp. 175-187
Author(s):  
Andy Propst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Middle Part ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Times ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Arthur Laurents

During the early and middle part of the 1960s Betty Comden and Adolph Green were no longer splitting their time between working on shows for Broadway and movies in Hollywood, and as a result they were able to dedicate more time to their personal lives. And while they might have been spending time with the elite of New York’s society, they were not unaware of the issues facing the country. This informed a pair of stand-alone songs they penned with Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein as well as their next musical, Hallelujah, Baby! Featuring a book by Arthur Laurents, the show chronicled the African-American experience during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Leslie Uggams was the star of what was ultimately an unconventional tuner that had music by Jule Styne and went on to win a Tony Award as best musical

The Legacy of Anna E. Hall, African American Missionary to Liberia

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-103
Author(s):  
Jenny McGill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
The Us ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Missionary Service ◽  
Free African Americans

This article, which tells the life story of Anna E. Hall, highlights the significant role that this African American missionary played in Liberia for the US Methodist Episcopal Church in the early twentieth century. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw increased migration of free African Americans as ministers . . . and missionaries overseas, especially to Africa. Standing as a paragon in missionary ventures, Anna E. Hall represents one of many who were responsible for the resurgence of Christianity in Africa and provides an exemplar for missionary service.

What Goes Up Must Come Down

2020 ◽  
pp. 118-142
Author(s):  
Robert E. Weems
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Life Insurance ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Insurance Company ◽  
Life Insurance Company ◽  
Manufacturing Company ◽  
National Bank

In late 1929, Anthony Overton was perceived to be the nation’s most successful black businessman. Yet, by the mid-1930s, the public’s perception of Overton had shifted dramatically. The Great Depression’s negative impact on African American real estate values negatively impacted the profitability of both the Douglass National Bank and the Victory Life Insurance Company. Also, disclosure of Overton’s long-standing, unauthorized funneling of Victory Life funds into Douglass National resulted in his ouster as president of Victory Life. Moreover, despite creative efforts to keep it afloat, the Douglass National Bank ultimately became a casualty of the Depression. In the end, Anthony Overton retained control of the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company and the Chicago Bee newspaper but had lost the honorific moniker “the Merchant Prince of his Race.”

The Emergence of a Black Leader during the Age of Jim Crow and Black Racial Uplift in North Carolina

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reginald K. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
Insurance Company ◽  
Black Leader ◽  
Life Insurance Company ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
The North

This chapter focuses on Shepard’s early education and career as a druggist, tax collector, cofounder of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, and superintendent of the International Sunday School Association. I also emphasize his “radical” approach to race relations in Durham at the turn of the twentieth century. By investigating these topics, I develop a clearer understanding of Shepard’s style of leadership as the eventual president of the North Carolina College for Negroes (NCC).

TRIBUTES TO JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-10
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Holt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American History ◽  
Life Story ◽  
African American History ◽  
Professional Study

Mirror to America, the title John Hope Franklin gave his autobiography, implied that one might recognize important themes of the nation's life-story in his own. Be that as it may, it is indisputable that in his life one can find the main themes and plot lines of the professional study of African American history, both its origins and its maturation, in the twentieth century.

Tuesday Evening

PMLA ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 1357-1357
Keyword(s):  
Life Insurance ◽  
Insurance Company ◽  
Life Insurance Company ◽  
Local Committee ◽  
Tuesday Evening

On Tuesday evening the members of the Association, and attending members of their families, were entertained with a buffet supper at the Queen City Club at 7:30 p.m. at the invitation of Messrs. Joseph S. Graydon, John J. Rowe, and other Cincinnati friends of the Association. Following this supper an entertainment arranged by the Local Committee was presented in the Hall of the Western and Southern Life Insurance Company. Attendance: about 900.

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

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