However, the author places most attention on six Black millionaires whose lives spanned from the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, with the most prominent protagonists being Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814-1904) and Robert Reed Church (1839-1912).īorn in Philadelphia, Pleasant became a financial investor in California.
Throughout Black Fortunes, Shomari Wills makes passing reference to Leidesdorff along with other leading nineteenth-century Black Americans such as Wall Street broker Jeremiah Hamilton, entrepreneur Alonzo Herndon, and land settler Edward P. When Leidesdorff’s family subsequently sued the investor in California, claiming that he had conned them, a series of 1850s California statutes and court decisions banning “blacks, Indians, and Chinese from testifying against white men in court” rendered their testimonies inadmissible in court. In fact, Leidesdorff’s estate was then worth $1.4 million ($38 million). However, reflecting the precariousness and short-lived nature of Black dynasties in the United States, Wills notes that a real estate investor convinced Leidesdorff’s sole heir-his estranged mother-to sign over his property in exchange for $75,000 ($2.1 million today). diplomat in California who in 1847 “built California’s first public school and a horse racing track for the citizens’ entertainment.” Passing away in 1848, Leidesdorff left behind an estate then valued over $1 million. Instead, the author explains that this title belongs to William Alexander Leidesdorff, entrepreneur and U.S. Walker (Sarah Breedlove) was the first Black millionaire in the United States.
Editors’ Note: HistPhil co-editor Maribel Morey reviews Shomari Wills’s Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires (New York: Amistad, HarperCollins Publishers, 2018).ĭetailing a history of the “first cohort of black millionaires” in the United States, journalist Shomari Wills begins Black Fortunes by correcting the popular myth that haircare entrepreneur Madam C.J.
0 kommentar(er)
