Arthur George Gaston was born on the Fourth of July, in a log cabin where he lived for most of his childhood. If that sounds like the beginning of a quintessentially American success story, it is. From his humble beginnings, A.G. Gaston became a successful entrepreneur and businessman, a millionaire many times over. But the circumstances of his life and his path to wealth and influence were far from ordinary.

Born in 1892, in Demopolis, Alabama, Gaston was the grandson of Joe and Idella Gaston, who had been enslaved. His father, Tom, was a railroad worker who died when “Art” was young – “I could scarcely remember him,” Gaston later wrote – and his mother, Rosie, had to move to Greensboro, then a distant 25 miles away, to find work, leaving Art in the care of his grandparents for most of his childhood.

Portrait of A.G. Gaston. (Birmingham Public Library Archives)

Gaston grew up in a time and place deeply affected by the Civil War and its aftermath, particularly the enforced racial segregation of the Jim Crow era and the violence that accompanied it. In his memoir, “Green Power,” first published in 1968, Gaston recalled witnessing a lynching on a Demopolis street corner. He also wrote of the legacy of slavery and the economic difficulties that were a fact of life for his family and other Black people.

“I know very little about my heritage and remember only vaguely the stories my grandfather told of the ‘big house,'” Gaston related. “He, my grandmother and my parents were honest people who diligently pursued the only trades they knew in the fields and in the homes of the white people of the community to provide a decent living for themselves and their families. Life was very hard.”

A new life in Birmingham

In 1905, Gaston was reunited with his mother, who had moved to Birmingham with the Loveman family, for whom she was the cook. The Lovemans owned what became the largest department store in the fast-growing city.

Rosie Gaston had a reputation as an outstanding cook and supplemented her income by catering social events, perhaps influencing her son’s development as an entrepreneur. In hopes of preparing Art to take full advantage of the few opportunities for advancement then available, she sent him across town to Tuggle Institute, a boarding school for Black children.

The institute was founded by Carrie A. Tuggle, a social activist and educator who had been born in slavery. Located in the middle-class Black community of Enon Ridge, the school received financial support from the Lovemans and other influential white people and was noted, in Gaston’s words, “for its realistic program of training for youth.”

Tuggle Institute was visited regularly by Booker T. Washington, the most influential Black leader in America at the time. Washington’s autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” was the first book Gaston ever owned, and the book and his personal exposure to Washington had tremendous influence on the young man.

After graduating in 1910, the 18-year-old Gaston wanted to join the Army but knew his mother would not give him permission. He made his way to Mobile, where he spent the next three years as a bellman at the Battle House Hotel. Reaching the age of 21 in 1913, Gaston enlisted in the Army and was stationed in Fort Riley, Kansas.

Alabama Legacy Moment: A.G. Gaston from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Gaston was deployed to France with his unit, the all-Black 92nd Division. He served with distinction, seeing combat action, including a narrow escape from a house that was destroyed minutes later by a German artillery shell.

‘Find a need and fill it’

Gaston’s seven-year enlistment in the Army ended in 1920, and he returned to Birmingham. After working briefly at a dry-cleaning plant, he took a job as a miner for the Tennessee Coal and Iron Co., earning $3.10 per day. Soon, he began earning extra money by selling his fellow miners homemade lunches prepared by his mother, who had left her job with the Loveman family to start her own catering business. Soon, he opened a stand selling peanuts and popcorn. He also began making loans to his co-workers.

Though Gaston charged 25% interest on the loans, the men who took them needed the money to supplement wages. Along with his other ventures, this reflected what became Gaston’s business philosophy and lifelong motto: Find a need and fill it.

Another such need Gaston encountered was insurance to pay for burials. That did not exist in the working-class Black community of the time, due to discrimination and higher mortality rates that made insurance companies reluctant to provide coverage to Blacks. In 1923, Gaston established what became the Booker T. Washington Insurance Co., with members paying 25 cents per week for policies to cover burial expenses.

Isaac Cooper.

Many other businesses followed. Gaston had married his childhood sweetheart, Creola Smith, and he and his father-in-law founded Smith and Gaston Funeral Directors, which gradually expanded business to include undertaking, casket manufacturing and sales of burial plots in company-owned cemeteries. In 1932, he started Booker T. Washington Insurance Co., which provided life, health and accident insurance.

Following the death of Creola in 1938, Gaston remarried the following year to Minnie L. Gardner. Soon afterward, the couple established Booker T. Washington Business College in response to a shortage of skilled clerks and typists that Gaston had noticed in his enterprises. Later, in the early 1950s, Gaston recognized the difficulties Blacks encountered in obtaining loans from white-owned banks and he founded the Citizens Federal Savings and Loan Association.

“Gaston’s decisions as an entrepreneur exemplified the empathy he had for his community and his desire to provide them the tools to build equity for themselves,” said Isaac Cooper, founder and CEO of IMC Financial Consulting and current chair of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. “He saw the generational detrimental costs that would be imposed on the Black community if their banks, insurance companies, funeral homes and other businesses did not play that role in their lives.”

Marie Sutton.

In addition to the role noted by Cooper, Gaston’s businesses encouraged and provided outlets for Birmingham’s expanding Black middle class in the post-World War II years. That was particularly true of the A.G. Gaston Motel, opened on Fifth Avenue North between 15th and 16th Streets in 1954.

“He could have hoarded his money, but he wanted to make sure he supported people of color,” said Marie Sutton, public information officer for the city of Birmingham and author of “The A.G. Gaston Motel in Birmingham: A Civil Rights Landmark.” “During a time when African Americans were seen as second-class citizens, they could go to the Gaston Motel and have a fine dining experience or walk into his bank and open a savings account. Gaston created safe places for Black people that provided them access to things they could not have otherwise.”

Navigating changes

Richard Arrington Jr.

The arrival of the civil rights era created new challenges and opportunities – for Birmingham and for Gaston. Beyond providing services for the Black community, he had long encouraged customers to exercise their right to vote. But, especially as movement activities in Birmingham culminated in 1963, his carefully cultivated “moderate” position relative to civil rights demands opened Gaston to criticism from activists, despite his financial support of the movement.

“He was very much for the goals of the movement,” Richard Arrington Jr. said. “But he was very much opposed to some of the tactics that were used, especially involving children in the demonstrations.”

Later elected as Birmingham’s first Black mayor, holding the office from 1979-99, Arrington in 1963 was a faculty member at Miles College. He accompanied Miles President Lucius Pitts to meetings of local Black leaders – and sometimes attended meetings in Pitts’ stead – with the Revs. Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth and other key figures in the local and national equal rights movement. Arrington’s recollections of Gaston’s involvement in the meetings remain vivid.

“He was in the forefront of the discussions,” said Arrington. “He was committed to keeping lines of communication open between all parties, including the white business leaders, and he played an instrumental role.”

Bob Dickerson.

Bob Dickerson is the executive director of the Birmingham Business Resource Center, which he founded in 1996. He is responsible for the annual A.G. Gaston Conference, which is being held for the 18th time Feb. 22-23. From 1985-89, Dickerson was vice president of Citizens Federal Savings Bank, working with Gaston on a daily basis. Discussing his view of the civil rights movement, Dickerson said, Gaston was always clear about his primary objective.

“He was a student of Booker T. Washington, so that belief in self-help and independence meant that the fight for civil rights also had to include the fight for silver rights,” Dickerson recalled. “As Dr. Gaston put it, anybody can check into a hotel, but you have to be able to check out. You have to pay your way, and he saw that as a goal of the movement, too.”

The difference in age between Gaston and movement leaders like King and Shuttlesworth also played a role, Sutton suggested. So did Gaston’s history in Birmingham and his background.

“It was natural that Gaston was looking for middle ground,” Sutton said. “He was several decades older. He was a businessman. He navigated the movement differently because he had different stakes. He wanted the same things, but he saw progress in a different context.”

A few years after the climactic events in Birmingham, Gaston’s memoir offered his thoughts on the subject:

“Birmingham, Alabama, is my home. … I make no apologies for having remained in the South, where I have not been lured to sleep with any false security or artificial status. I am glad to be associated with the Negro in the South, who is opening the eyes of the entire nation.

“There is evidence the white South realizes and recognizes the importance of responsible Negroes working together, one for all, for the improvement of the vast majority of the communities in the South with continued honest, sincere and open-minded communication between the races in the South. It is toward that goal that we all should work.”

‘An amazing man’

A.G. Gaston died Jan. 19, 1996, at the age of 103. In the more than three decades of his life after Birmingham’s civil rights era, his business empire and civic contributions continued to grow. In 1968, he started the A.G. Gaston Boys Club (now the A.G. Gaston Boys & Girls Club) to provide local youths with educational, recreational and career and leadership development services. In addition to the companies already mentioned here, his holdings came to include a real estate company, a construction company, a senior citizens home and two radio stations.

A.G. Gaston. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, courtesy of Birmingham Public Library)

In 1987, in an act that changed the trajectories of many lives, Gaston sold Booker T. Washington Insurance Co. – valued at $34 million – to his employees for $3.5 million. In 1992, the year of his 100th birthday, Black Enterprise magazine recognized Gaston as “Entrepreneur of the Century.” In 2017, President Barack Obama made the Gaston Motel the centerpiece of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument. In 2020, the A.G. Gaston Boys & Girls Club opened a new, 25,000-square-foot facility in the Five Points West neighborhood.

“We continue to honor him and hold him up as an example,” said Dickerson. “On the day he was born, he had a better chance of being lynched than of becoming a millionaire. But he changed the world around him.”

Arrington said he continues to cherish the relationship he enjoyed with Gaston and the impact he had on Birmingham. Even during the most challenging times, Gaston was “positive about Birmingham” and “always came through” with the support the city needed, financial or otherwise.

“He built a business empire,” Arrington said. “For a Black American in Alabama at that time, what he did was phenomenal. He created hundreds, if not thousands, of professional jobs filled mostly by Black people. And he paid his civic rent.

“He was an amazing man.”