Black Fortunes

Journalist Shomari Wills traces the lives of six African Americans who built extraordinary wealth despite slavery and systemic racism. Wills frames the book with his own family history: His great-great-uncle John Mott Drew, born in 1883 to a formerly enslaved father, founded the first African American-owned bus line and traded stocks through a white broker to avoid racial exclusion. Drew's story, Wills argues, illustrates a larger, overlooked chapter of American history in which attaining economic independence was itself a revolutionary act for people stripped of economic personhood during slavery.

The book opens with William Alexander Leidesdorff, a mixed-race man of Jewish Danish and Black Caribbean parentage who sailed to California after his racial identity destroyed his engagement to a white woman in New Orleans. In San Francisco, he built an import-export company, a hotel, and a lumberyard, and the Mexican government granted him over 35,000 acres. After gold was discovered in 1848, his holdings surpassed $1 million, making him the first African American millionaire. He died soon after, and a white investor swindled his mother into signing over the estate for a fraction of its value.

Mary Ellen Pleasant, born free and Black in Philadelphia in 1814, was sent at age seven to Nantucket, Massachusetts, where a Quaker family put her to work in their store rather than enrolling her in school. She taught herself to read and absorbed business skills. Around 1842, she moved to Boston and married James W. Smith, a wealthy abolitionist who made her promise to devote part of his estate to freeing enslaved people. When Smith died less than two years later, Pleasant inherited his fortune, married John James Pleasants (JJ), and followed JJ to California during the gold rush. In San Francisco, she became a moneylender and commodities trader, amassing more than $150,000 by 1858. She funded John Brown's planned slave insurrection, giving him a large bank draft at the Provisional Constitutional Convention Brown convened in Chatham, Ontario. Brown's premature raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry failed, and he was executed in December 1859. Pleasant went into hiding after authorities found a letter from her among Brown's papers.

Robert Reed Church, born in 1839 on a cotton plantation outside Memphis, was the son of an enslaved woman named Emmeline and a wealthy white steamboat captain, Charles B. Church. After Emmeline died in 1851, the captain broke his promise to educate Robert and instead put the twelve-year-old to work on his Mississippi River steamships. When the Civil War began, Robert was conscripted into the Confederate Navy. On June 6, 1862, during the Union attack on Memphis, Robert jumped overboard and swam to freedom.

Church opened a billiard hall in Memphis in 1866 without a license after being denied one because of his race. During the Memphis Race Riots of 1866, a white mob shot him in the neck and burned his building, but he survived. He began buying real estate in the Beale Street District, helped his friend Blanche K. Bruce win election to the US Senate in 1875, and became a power broker in Black politics. During a yellow fever epidemic in 1878, he stayed in Memphis and bought properties at deep discounts. Journalist Ida B. Wells challenged him to use his wealth for his community, and her influence pushed Church toward greater activism. He opened Church Park and Auditorium around the turn of the century and the first Black-owned bank in Memphis in 1906. He died in August 1912, leaving an estate worth over a million dollars.

Wills provides broader context through shorter chapters. One profiles Jeremiah Hamilton, New York's richest Black man in the 1860s, who narrowly survived a lynch mob during the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, illustrating that wealth offered no protection from racial violence. Another recounts how emancipated African Americans in Oklahoma were denied the land promised to them after the Civil War.

Pleasant returned to San Francisco after Brown's execution, her funds depleted by more than $40,000 from funding the insurrection. She worked as a head domestic and, after the Civil War, successfully sued to desegregate San Francisco's streetcars. White newspapers retaliated by dubbing her "Mammy Pleasant," a racist epithet she carried for life. She opened a high-end boardinghouse, invested in Nevada mining stock with her boarder Thomas Bell, a railroad and mining executive, and became a millionaire. After Bell died in a fall in 1892, his son Frederick sued Pleasant, alleging theft and murder. She died in January 1904, leaving an estate worth $600,000.

Annie Minerva Turnbo, born in 1869 in Illinois to formerly enslaved parents who died when she was a toddler, created the Wonderful Hair Grower to treat Black women whose hair had been damaged by chemical straighteners. In 1903, she moved to St. Louis and built a national sales network at the World's Fair, naming her company Poro Products. Among her hires was Sarah Breedlove, a laundress whose damaged hair Annie restored. Breedlove later moved to Denver, married C. J. Walker, and began selling copycat products as Madam C. J. Walker, since Annie had not trademarked her formulas. By 1914, Malone was worth up to $3 million with over four thousand agents, while Walker fought for market share. Walker died of kidney failure in May 1919 with a net worth just over half a million dollars, though her manager promoted her as a millionaire. Malone's fortune eroded through a costly divorce from her husband Aaron Malone and mounting tax debts. She died in 1957, eulogized in some publications merely as Walker's mentor.

Hannah Elias, born around 1867 in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward, one of America's first free Black neighborhoods, was imprisoned at eighteen for borrowing a dress from her employer. After her father banished her, she ended up working in a brothel in New York's Tenderloin district, where she met John R. Platt, a sixty-four-year-old millionaire glass manufacturer. Their affair spanned years, with Platt wiring her thousands of dollars monthly and eventually purchasing her a mansion on Central Park West. When a former tenant murdered a prominent city planner in 1903, the investigation exposed Elias's relationship with Platt. His family forced Platt to sue her, alleging extortion, but Platt refused to cooperate at trial, and the charges were dismissed. Elias quietly invested in Harlem real estate with John Nail, a Black developer, helping transform the neighborhood into a Black enclave. In 1923, she sailed for Europe and disappeared from public life.

Ottowa W. Gurley's story centers on Greenwood, the Black district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, that Booker T. Washington called "Negro Wall Street," later known as "Black Wall Street." After the 1893 Oklahoma land run, Gurley moved to Tulsa during its oil boom and purchased forty acres north of the train tracks. With fellow businessman J. B. Stradford, he built an all-Black commercial district that grew to eight thousand residents. Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial separation and restricted Black voting, ironically strengthened Greenwood's economy by confining Black commerce within the community. By 1921, Gurley was worth as much as $1 million. On Memorial Day 1921, an elevator encounter between a Black teenager and a white girl was sensationalized by newspapers. Armed Black men went to the courthouse to prevent a lynching, and a confrontation escalated into gunfire. White mobs poured into Greenwood, burning and looting. Gurley lost more than $250,000 and moved to South Los Angeles. Greenwood's survivors eventually rebuilt.

Wills concludes that most subjects' nominal wealth faded after their deaths, but their legacies endure. Their lives, marked by assassination attempts, mob violence, and legal persecution, demonstrate that wealth served as a powerful resource for change in the ongoing journey from enslavement to economic equality.