#113 A.G. Gaston (Black Titan and the Making of a Black American Millionaire)

**David Senra** (0:01)
Pick any sweltering day in the year 1919 On the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, in a small mining village, hundreds of Black men are at work side by side. Some of the men are convicts, some are war veterans. One of these men is on the verge of taking his first step in the direction of becoming a bona fide millionaire, 100 times over.
AG. Gaston started with next to nothing. His mother was a cook in the kitchen of a prominent white family. He never had more than a 10th grade education. After the war, he had taken his position in the mines as a means of survival, only to emerge utterly determined that his life was worth more than what the mines were offering.
That determination was a kind of miracle given the context in which Gaston had been raised. And that miracle is the foundation of the story that you're about to hear. All right, so that comes from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Black Titan, AG. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire, and is written by Carol Jenkins and Elizabeth Gardner Hines.
So this is another book that was recommended to me by a listener, and I went to the Amazon product page and read the description. And this first sentence was enough for me to know that I had to read the book. It says, the grandson of slaves born into poverty in 1892 in the deep south, AG. Gaston died more than a century later with a fortune well over $130 million and a business empire spanning communications, real estate and insurance. So let's go ahead and jump right into the book. Something to know, there's two authors. One author is actually the niece of AG. Gaston and the co-author is her daughter. So they have a lot of background to give us because he was the central part of a fairly large family and they have a lot of information that is just not available anywhere else. All right, so I'm going to start out with his early life. He was heavily influenced as that product description just said. He's a grandson of slaves. He actually lived with his grandparents from a very early age. And so their names were Joe and Idella Gaston. And he says this is what he learned from them. He says they were former slaves. They wind up being granted their freedom and then they worked extremely hard and wind up owning and developing land.
They're essentially farmers. And he says the Gastons were lucky enough to fashion a new kind of existence for themselves –one that left a lasting impression of the value of hard work and sacrifice on their grandson. So the story of AG. Gaston is him, just like most humans, being influenced and inspired by the examples of others. So this hard work is something that he engaged in.
His niece said that he had a singular focus on financial success. And you'll see that a lot today. So it says, let me tell you a little bit about his mother, which is obviously the daughter of Joe and Adela. Her name is Rosie. And it says, Rosie Gaston had not been immune to the economic imbalance and the systematic underdevelopment that resulted from it. The only skills she possessed as a cook or a maid were ones in excess in this little town they lived in. I think it's called Demopolis. So, this forced her to look elsewhere, a bigger city for work.
So, what happens is she's forced to leave her son and go to a larger city to seek opportunity. And it says, to give you an idea of that, the author says, what did Rosie Gaston feel on that first hot day when she peeled her son from her skirts and headed down to a road leading to who knew where.
So, why is that happening?
His father dies. We don't know too much about it. He doesn't really... AG wrote an autobiography in, I think he published it in like the 1960s, and he just says, my father died. And even the family doesn't know too... like, they don't know the details of what happened. So, his father dies, his mother must leave to seek more opportunity. And so it says, AG would watch closely and learn as first one of his parents, and then the other stepped away from a life that was dedicated to the soil. So, they're talking about... they're seeking opportunity that's different from the opportunity, the only opportunity presented to his grandparents. So, they're leaving a life that was dedicated to soil, and search out a means of survival based on increasingly skilled forms of labor. His father would die for the promise of the industrial age, and partly as a result of this, his mother would be forced to leave him behind as she too attempted to build a life away from the land. Both his father's failure and his mother's success in the newly industrial society would leave lasting effects on the boy who by the age of 10 had already learned enough of the world to inspire his first business idea. So his father worked constructing railroads as best as the family could put together as he died as a result of that work. Now they just said at 10 years old, his first business idea. What is his first business idea? So something to some background before I read this section to you is that he was fairly unpopular. He didn't have a lot of social skills. He says he was a square.