Black History

The Untold Stories of Blacks in Business

THE WESTSIDE GAZETTE — While most Black businesses showed surprising growth and diversity leading up to the Civil War, what enabled their success was the Black participation in the banking system. Leading into the early twentieth century, Black-owned insurance companies, caterers, funeral homes and burial services were among the emerging industries for Black entrepreneurs.

Published

7 years ago

May 5, 2019

Oakland Post

By Carma Henry

Business is much on our minds at The HistoryMakers. Not only are we in the midst of assembling the nation’s largest repository of video oral history on the subject of Blacks in business, but PBS recently aired An Evening with Ken Chenault, which is airing again this week along with our premiere of BOSS, the two-hour long feature of the Black experience in business. BOSS has received rave reviews including one from Mary Wilson of The Supremes who noted, “It was riveting I could not take my eyes off it.” While BOSS represents an important start, it is by no means comprehensive. There are many, many stories within The HistoryMakers archive and still more that have not been documented. Consider the following:

While most Black businesses showed surprising growth and diversity leading up to the Civil War, what enabled their success was the Black participation in the banking system. Leading into the early twentieth century, Black-owned insurance companies, caterers, funeral homes and burial services were among the emerging industries for Black entrepreneurs including John Merrick who founded North Carolina Mutual Life in 1899 to become the nation’s largest Black insurance company, and Alonzo Franklin Herndon, who was born a slave and made his fortune as a barber and then as a real estate investor. He ultimately purchased a failing mutual aid society and turned it into the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. The late former CEO of Atlanta Life Financial Group, Ronald Brown recalled, “Alonzo Franklin Herndon, who was a former slave, had what was then referred to as the finest barbershop in the Southeast, and all of his customers were white. And they did not even know that Mr. Herndon owned the barbershop. They thought he worked there. And to make them feel comfortable, he actually would enter through the back door of his own establishment.”

Coupled with white resistance and the global economic collapse during the Great Depression, Black businesses were hit particularly hard. What followed were some of the greatest Black entrepreneurs like A.G. Gaston, who owned a number of businesses and played a significant role in the struggle to integrate Birmingham in 1963. Real estate entrepreneur and civil rights activist Joe Dickson remembered how Gaston gave him $200 a week so he could study and pass the bar exam. Entrepreneur Comer Joseph Cottrell recalled his father’s advice to Gaston to start an insurance company, “He met A.G. Gaston, who had a funeral home, and he befriended A.G. and told him about the insurance business and told him that since he had a funeral home, that in the State of Alabama at the time, you weren’t required to have a certain capitalization to start a burial insurance company. All you had to have is a funeral home with the ability to bury the people. So, my dad talked him into setting up a burial insurance company and that was Booker T. Washington Insurance.”

There is also, of course, the histories of individuals like S.B. Fuller, featured in the BOSS film, who built an empire of personal care products with Fuller Products and became the largest Black-owned business from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Fuller also served as a role model for George Johnson who founded Johnson Products. Johnson reflected on how Fuller got his start, “He started with twenty-five dollars, which was a refund from insurance on his car. He took that twenty-five dollars, and he bought soap, and he hand-made labels, put them on the soap, and started selling soap with the money that he got from that. From that he turned it into soap, and he turned the soap into money, just turning that over. And eventually he added other things, and that was the start of Fuller Products in 1936.” Johnson Products would go on to be the first African American company listed on the American Stock Exchange. That legacy of entrepreneurship was not lost on Johnson’s son Eric Johnson who later bought Baldwin Ice Cream Company, which he merged with Richardson Foods to become Baldwin Richardson Foods and has grown it into a $300 million company.

Soft Sheen hair care company founders Edward and Bettiann Gardner launched their hair care empire from their basement, Bettiann Gardner recalled how her husband would experiment with new products to sell. After several rejections and modifications, her husband noted, “I went back in the basement and started putting my pot back on again and started taking some wax out and doing a lot of things to it.” When he found something that worked, his wife said, “I’m gonna go down there in the basement with you with my pad and pencil and I’m gonna write down everything you put in and the quantity. So that it will become a formula and you’ll be able to duplicate it every time the same way.”

While BOSS features John H. Johnson, founder of Johnson Publishing Company and Earl Graves, founder of Black Enterprise magazine it does not touch upon Edward Lewis, Clarence O. Smith, Cecil Hollingsworth and Jonathan Blount, founders of Essence magazine or Bob Johnson the founder of BET or Oprah Winfrey, all media moguls in their own right. And then there is Reverend Jesse Jackson and his role in the financial industry with the Wall Street Project. This is the just the tip of the iceberg, and it is our goal to bring more stories to light.

This article originally appeared in The Westside Gazette.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Up Next

New Orleans Native, Actor Wendell Pierce and Businessmen Troy Henry, Cleveland Spears, And Jeff Thomas Purchase Wbok Talk Radio

Don't Miss

Florida A&M University and the Medical Marijuana Education and Research Initiative announce Recipients of Medical Marijuana Research Grants

Oakland Post

Click to comment

Activism

Diabetes in Black California: Turning the Tide from Crisis to Control

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data, nearly 17.9% of Black adults in California have been diagnosed with diabetes — above the national Black adult average of 16.8%, and nearly five points higher than California’s overall adult rate of 12.6% across all races. California ranks 24th out of 39 states with available data for Black adult diabetes rates.

Published

17 hours ago

July 5, 2026

Oakland Post

Dr. Khadijah Lang is a family physician with a clinic in Los Angeles who specializes in several family medical practices, including prenatal care. Lang believes in family medicine. She says it is important to treat all members of a family. Thursday, June 5, 2026. Photo by Solomon O. Smith/California Black Media.

By Charlene Muhammad, California Black Media

Crystal Lambert knew something was terribly wrong with her three-year-old granddaughter as she sped down the street trying to get her to the hospital.

“I thought she got a hold of some poison,” Lambert recalled.

Doctors found Lambert’s granddaughter had a blood sugar level over 800, diagnosing her with Diabetic Ketoacidosis(DKA), a state in which the body, starved of insulin, begins to shut down.

Lambert said she was born with a pancreas that was not fully functioning — it lacked the specialized cells required to produce insulin.

Her granddaughter survived and is five years old today. Now, she gives herself insulin shots, asks endless questions about her condition, and runs like the spirited child she is. But the terror of that night transformed Lambert — and ultimately inspired her to launch the We Fight Back Organization, a mobile health and food access initiative serving underserved communities across California. Lambert is the executive director.

The Crisis by the Numbers

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data, nearly 17.9% of Black adults in California have been diagnosed with diabetes — above the national Black adult average of 16.8%, and nearly five points higher than California’s overall adult rate of 12.6% across all races. California ranks 24th out of 39 states with available data for Black adult diabetes rates.

Nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Black Americans were 24% more likely than the overall U.S. population to have diabetes in 2024. They also died from diabetes 78% more often than the general population in 2022. Black Americans are also more than twice as likely as the overall population to develop kidney failure caused by diabetes.

According to the California Health Care Foundation’s 2024 Health Disparities Almanac, Black Californians have the shortest life expectancy in the state at just 74.6 years — due in part to chronic conditions like diabetes and its devastating complications.

Leon Rock, co-founder of the African American Diabetes Association, believes statistics, though revealing, only tell part of the story.

“There are a whole bunch of Black folks that don’t tell you that they have diabetes — or don’t know,” he said.

And the disease itself, Rock is careful to note, is not what kills. “They die from the complications. That’s heart attack, that’s stroke, that’s amputations of legs, of feet. Going blind. All those complications are inherent in a system that has impacted Black folks with diabetes in California and across America.”

Crystal Lambert, creator and executive director of We Fight Back. She started the organization out of a need to learn more about diabetes on behalf of her granddaughter. Now she is looking to spread the impact of her organization to the valley. Friday, June 6, 2026. Photo by Solomon O. Smith/California Black Media.

Crystal Lambert, creator and executive director of the We Fight Back Organization, started out of a need to learn more about diabetes on behalf of her granddaughter. Now she is looking to spread her organization to the valley, on Friday, June 6, 2026 Photo by Solomon O. Smith/ California Black Media

An Information Gap Fuels the Crisis

For Rock, part of the solution is diagnosis. He says the medical and public health systems are failing Black Californians by the absence of information designed for them.

“That is the bottom line. We need good information. Information that is culturally specific,” said Rock.

Telling people to eat healthy or exercise, he added, falls short when culturally specific alternatives are not provided, and when many residents of urban communities do not feel safe exercising in some neighborhoods – or outside at night.

Dr. Khadijah Lang, a family medicine physician and president of the Golden State Medical Association, agrees that the roots of the crisis run deeper than individual behavior — and blaming patients misses the point.

“We are not genetically predisposed to diabetes,” Lang said. “But the system under which we live increases the likelihood that we will develop it.”

What the Body Needs — What Communities Are Denied

Type 2 diabetes, which accounts for 90 to 95% of all diabetes cases, according to the CDC, develops when the body can no longer use insulin effectively to regulate blood sugar. Left unmanaged, it damages nerves, kidneys, eyes, and the cardiovascular system. The hemoglobin A1C test is a blood draw that reveals how the body has processed sugar over the previous three months — not just at the moment of the test. It is the standard tool for both diagnosis and ongoing monitoring.

That distinction matters, Lang emphasized, because patients cannot manipulate three months of blood sugar history the way they might fast for a day before a single blood draw.

“The pill is not meant to undo or control a sugar level that’s being constantly stressed,” Lang said. “It’s meant to work in conjunction with a low-carbohydrate diet and exercise.” She recommended at minimum 30 minutes of physical activity five days a week — breakable into 10-minute sessions for those who need it.

Lang stressed that education must be delivered in language people recognize and can relate to. The goal is to inform them of the choices that serve their health best, she said.

But for many Black Californians, even those informed choices remain out of reach, Lambert said.

“They need access to healthy foods and medication, too” she said.

California has made some critical policy advances. The state has expanded access to the Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), which has transformed diabetes care for state residents. Assembly Bill 365, introduced in 2024, proposed requiring Medi-Cal to cover the costs of CGM and other related medical equipment but it failed in the State Senate. Since then, the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) reports that the core Medi-Cal CGM benefit now available to eligible patients was solidified through previous budget actions and pharmacy policy updates.

These measures, while meaningful, have not closed the gap for the communities most at risk, according to advocates.

Control Through Community

Health care advocates conclude that the solution must be communal, culturally grounded, and sustained — not a fad, not a celebrity moment, not a single clinic visit. For example, observed Lang, lifestyle shaped by shared values and collective accountability can move the needle where individual prescriptions have not.

Rock is building infrastructure to match the urgency, establishing local chapters of the African American Diabetes Association across the country, with California next.

“We have to do for self, period,” he said. “Health is wealth. We have to eat to live.”

And Lambert, whose granddaughter unknowingly started all of this for her, keeps showing up.

“Diabetes advocacy is about dignity, education, prevention, and hope,” she said.

Video: Diabetes Disparity Exposed in California

This article is supported by the California Health Care Foundation

(CHCF). Visit www.chcf.org

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Activism

Oakland Post: Week of July 1 – 7, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of July 1 – 7, 2026

Published

19 hours ago

July 5, 2026

Oakland Post

To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Arts and Culture

Prescott Circus Theatre Presents Free Summer Performance Series

Now in its 41st year, the Prescott Circus Theatre is a nationally recognized performing arts education program for Oakland youth. The circus offers safe environments that challenge Oakland youth, through circus arts training, to develop the skills and confidence to thrive on stage, in school, and in life.

Published

1 week ago

June 26, 2026

Oakland Post

Prescott Circus showcase pathways pyramid. Photo courtesy of Prescott Circus.

By Post Staff

The Prescott Circus, Oakland’s longest-running youth circus, is returning this summer with its free shows. Join the Prescott Circus’s young stars as they share their joys and talents through stilt-dancing, tumbling, juggling, and more.

At the heart of this one-hour show, which demonstrates teamwork, pride, and joy, are Oakland Unified School District students ages 8 – 17 from more than 10 different schools

This is accomplished through no-cost school and community programs for more than 300 Oakland youth each year. Performing company members from Prescott, where the program began, perform and make appearances at as many as 40 Bay Area events each year.

The summer program is funded in part by Oakland Fund for Children and Youth, California Arts Council, Port of Oakland, and the West Davis & Bergard Foundation.

Performances will be held Tuesday, July 14, 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. (ASL interpreted) and Wednesday, July 15, 11 a.m., at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St., Oakland. For free reservations go to

https://PrescottCircusSummerShows.eventbrite.com

For group reservations for camps, childcare centers, senior centers, go to www.prescottcircus.org

A community show will be held Saturday, July 18, 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., at DeFremery Park,1651 Adeline St., Oakland.