Entrepreneurs & Business Pioneers
Builders of enterprises and institutions
A. G. Gaston
1892 – 1996
Demopolis and Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Birmingham entrepreneur who built burial, insurance, funeral, business-school, savings-and-loan and motel enterprises, and quietly backed the 1963 civil rights campaign, including bailing out Martin Luther King Jr.
Stub: research pending
Annie Turnbo Malone
1869 – 1957
Illinois (Metropolis, Lovejoy, Chicago) and St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Illinois-born entrepreneur whose Poro hair-care company and St. Louis beauty school, Poro College, made her one of the wealthiest Black women in the United States in the 1920s. Madam C. J. Walker began as one of her sales agents.
Biddy Mason
1818 – 1891
Mississippi; Utah; Los Angeles, California
Enslaved Biddy Mason won freedom for herself and her extended family in an 1856 Los Angeles court case, then became a midwife, property owner and philanthropist who helped found the city's First AME Church.
Stub: research pending
Charles Clinton Spaulding
1874 – 1952
Columbus County and Durham, North Carolina, United States
North Carolina-born executive who revived the failing North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company as general manager from 1900, became president in 1923, and made it the nation's largest Black-owned insurer.
Stub: research pending
Earl G. Graves Sr.
1935 – 2020
Brooklyn, New York and Washington, D.C., United States
Brooklyn-born publisher who worked on Senator Robert F. Kennedy's staff, launched Black Enterprise magazine in 1970, and owned Pepsi-Cola's Washington, D.C. bottler from 1990 until selling it in 1998.
Stub: research pending
Greenwood District ("Black Wall Street") and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
c. 1906 – 1921 (massacre May 31 – June 1, 1921)
Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States
Greenwood, a prosperous Black business district in Tulsa known as "Black Wall Street," was destroyed by white mobs on May 31–June 1, 1921; historians estimate up to 300 deaths.
James Forten
1766 – 1842
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Free-born Philadelphian who served on privateers in the Revolutionary War and was held captive by the British, then grew wealthy as a sailmaker and helped lead the city's antislavery movement.
Stub: research pending
Jean Baptiste Point du Sable
c. 1745 – 1818
Saint-Domingue (Haiti); Chicago and Peoria, Illinois; St. Charles, Missouri, United States
Trader of African descent, probably born in Saint-Domingue, who with his Potawatomi wife Kitihawa built the first permanent non-Indigenous settlement and trading post at the Chicago River around 1778–79.
Stub: research pending
John H. Johnson
1918–2005
Chicago, Illinois (born Arkansas City, Arkansas)
Arkansas-born, Chicago-based publisher John H. Johnson founded Negro Digest (1942), Ebony (1945) and Jet (1951), became the first African American on the Forbes wealthiest list, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996.
Stub: research pending
Madam C. J. Walker
1867 – 1919
United States (Louisiana, Missouri, Colorado, Indiana, New York)
Born Sarah Breedlove to a family freed from slavery, she built the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, a national hair-care business staffed by thousands of Black women agents, and became a leading philanthropist and anti-lynching advocate.
Maggie L. Walker
1864 – 1934
Richmond, Virginia
Richmond-born Maggie Lena Walker revived the Independent Order of St. Luke, launched its newspaper in 1902, and in 1903 opened St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, becoming the first Black woman in the U.S. to found and lead a bank.
Mary Ellen Pleasant
c. 1814 – 1904
San Francisco and Oakland, California, United States
Gold Rush-era San Francisco entrepreneur who invested in laundries, boardinghouses, real estate and mining, called herself a 'capitalist', and sued a streetcar company over racial exclusion in the 1860s.
Stub: research pending
O. W. Gurley
1868 – 1935
Alabama; Arkansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Los Angeles
Ottawa W. Gurley, born in Alabama to formerly enslaved parents, bought land on Tulsa's north side, sold lots and made loans to Black residents, and is widely credited as a founder of Greenwood.
Stub: research pending
Paul Cuffe
1759 – 1817
Massachusetts, United States, and Sierra Leone
Westport, Massachusetts mariner and merchant, son of a formerly enslaved African father and a Wampanoag mother, who protested taxation without voting rights and in 1815 carried Black American settlers to Sierra Leone.
Stub: research pending
Philip A. Payton Jr.
c. 1876 – 1917
Harlem, New York City
Real estate entrepreneur Philip A. Payton Jr. led the Afro-American Realty Company (1904–1909), leasing and renting Harlem buildings to Black tenants and helping make Harlem a center of Black New York.
Stub: research pending
Reginald F. Lewis
1942 – 1993
Baltimore, Maryland; New York, United States
Baltimore-born, Harvard-trained corporate lawyer whose TLC Group bought McCall Pattern in 1983 and Beatrice Foods' international operations in 1987 for about $985 million, creating TLC Beatrice, the first Black-owned company with more than $1 billion in annual sales.
Robert S. Abbott
1868 – 1940
Georgia and Chicago, United States
St. Simons Island-born publisher who launched the Chicago Defender in 1905; within about a decade it was the nation's leading Black newspaper and a powerful promoter of the Great Migration north.
Stub: research pending