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Article

Ballard, John  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
29 February 2012

pioneer settler in Los Angeles County, California, in the 1850s, blacksmith, teamster, firewood salesman, and landowner, was born in Kentucky around 1827. Although it is commonly assumed that he had been enslaved there, he arrived in California a free man prior to the Civil War, and nothing has been established about his previous life.

He was married on 6 November 1859 to a woman named Amanda, born in Texas, by Jesse Hamilton, the earliest pastor of First African Methodist Episcopal church, Los Angeles. Their first two children, Dora and Julia, were born in 1857 and 1859. In 1860 the household included a laborer named Juan Jose, recorded by the census as being of Indian ancestry. Another man of African descent, Oscar Smith from Mississippi lived next door and no race was specified for the other neighbors who had either English or Hispanic names ...

Article

Browne, William Washington  

David M. Fahey

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

fraternal society leader and banker, was born in Habersham County, Georgia, the son of Joseph Browne and Mariah (maiden name unknown), field slaves. As a young child he was called Ben Browne and was chosen to be the companion of his owner's son. A subsequent owner who lived near Memphis trained Browne as a jockey for race circuits in Tennessee and Mississippi. During the Civil War he plotted an escape with fellow slaves. When his owner learned of the conspiracy, he transferred Browne to a plantation in Mississippi. Despite the difficulties of tramping fifty miles without a compass, Browne persuaded three other young slaves to join him in a successful escape to the Union army at Memphis. After learning that his owner could demand his return, Browne fled upriver as a stowaway.

Browne later worked as a saloon servant in Illinois where his barroom experiences made him a teetotaler and ...

Article

Burdett, Samuel  

Michelle Kuhl

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

businessman, anti-lynching advocate, and pioneering member of Seattle, Washington's black middle class, was born in Kentucky, but exactly when or where has not been established. Some indications of Burdett's background, however, emerge from the 1850 census of Bullitt, Kentucky. One “Sam'l Burdett” is listed as a four-year-old black child living in the household of a white Burdette family headed by a fifty-year-old man named Pyton Burdett, who had a wife and seven children. A black woman named Louisa Burdett is also included in the household along with three black children, among them, “Sam'l.” The status of Louisa and her three children as either slaves or free persons is not indicated. Whatever her background in 1850, it is clear that ten years later Louisa had prospered. In 1860 the Bullitt Kentucky census listed Louisa Burdett 36 with three children including a fourteen year old Samuel living in their ...

Article

Burrell, Berkeley Graham  

Edward L. Lach

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

business executive and civic leader, was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Hayward G. Burrell and Fannie Miles. Although his parents’ occupations are unknown, both his father and his mother were natives of the District of Columbia, and Burrell's roots in the area ran deep. After graduating from Dunbar High School at the age of fifteen, he worked as a driver for a local pharmacy and apparently also drove a cab for a while. He married at age sixteen (his wife's name is unknown), and the marriage produced a son before ending in divorce seven years later.

In 1941 Burrell gained a position at the federal Bureau of Standards, where he worked in the glass section producing prisms and bombsights. He also attended nearby Howard University between 1941 and 1943 but did not graduate. He entered the U.S. Army in 1945 and rose to the rank of ...

Article

DeBaptiste, George  

David F. Herr

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
21 January 1999
Published online:
01 December 2006

DeBaptiste, George (1814?–22 February 1875), abolitionist and businessman, was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the son of John DeBaptiste, a businessman, and Frances “Franky” (maiden name unknown). Although the details of DeBaptiste’s early life are uncertain, he appears to have traveled to Richmond, Virginia, as a youth, where he learned to barber and where, perhaps in 1829, as a free black, he first helped a slave escape. While still in Virginia, he married his first wife, Maria Lucinda Lee, a slave, and bought her freedom. DeBaptiste subsequently remarried and had two children; his second wife’s name is unknown. As a young man he demonstrated strong loyalty to his family, who remained in Fredericksburg. On two separate occasions in the 1820s he financially secured the property of two sisters when they faced significant debt (Fitzgerald, p. 53).

Between 1836 and 1838 DeBaptiste moved to Madison Indiana where he barbered ...

Article

DeBaptiste, George  

David F. Herr

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

abolitionist and businessman, was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the son of John DeBaptiste, a businessman, and Frances “Franky” (maiden name unknown). Although the details of DeBaptiste's early life are uncertain, he appears to have traveled to Richmond, Virginia, as a youth, where he learned to barber and where, perhaps in 1829, as a free black he first helped a slave escape. While still in Virginia, he married his first wife, Maria Lucinda Lee, a slave, and bought her freedom. DeBaptiste subsequently remarried and had two children; his second wife's name is unknown. As a young man he demonstrated strong loyalty to his family, who remained in Fredericksburg. On two separate occasions in the 1820s he financially secured the property of two sisters when they faced significant debt.

Between 1836 and 1838 DeBaptiste moved to Madison Indiana where he barbered engaged in a number of other ...

Article

Dumas, François Ernest  

Caryn Cossé Bell

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

businessman, Civil War veteran, and Reconstruction politician, was the son of the influential Creole New Orleanian Joseph Dumas, one of the owners of the Dumas Brothers French Quarter clothiers, a firm that specialized in imported French cloth and luxury apparel. Joseph Dumas invested his share of the firm's profits in real estate and accumulated a considerable fortune in property holdings and slaves. In 1860 African American Louisianans like François and Joseph Dumas constituted the wealthiest population of free blacks in the United States.

Joseph Dumas's import business necessitated that the Dumas family sojourn frequently in France, and it was there that François, was born, raised, and educated. François arrived in New Orleans shortly before the Civil War to manage the family business. He married Marguerite Victoria Victor, and the couple had five children, three girls and two boys. By 1860 he had become one ...

Article

Dupree, Anna Johnson  

Dianne Dentice

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

businesswoman, philanthropist, and humanitarian, was born Anna Johnson in Carthage, Texas. She was the first of Lee and Eliza Johnson's six children. Her great-grandfather, a slave owner, was German. Her maternal grandmother, Jane Sims, was part Native American and came to Texas from Kentucky. The family lived in poverty and Anna's grandmother helped pay the bills by working as a cook in a local hotel. The rest of the family, Anna included, worked in the cotton fields of East Texas. When she was thirteen, the family moved from Carthage to Galveston hoping for a better life. Her mother found work as a maid for several prominent Galveston families and Anna assisted her. With a natural creative talent and an eye for pretty things, Anna made her own clothes. Mrs. Zula Kay a prominent resident of Galveston noticed her and invited Anna to move to Houston ...

Article

Easton, Sampson  

Theresa Vara-Dannen

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
29 February 2016

entrepreneur, abolitionist, music teacher, and banjoist, was born in Hartford, Connecticut to Hosea Easton, a Boston-born minister in Hartford and Hosea's wife, the former Louisa Matrick. Sampson Easton's lineage is distinguished on both sides of his tri-racial family because his mother was the daughter of Quack Matrick, a Revolutionary War soldier; his paternal grandfather was James Easton of Boston, a well-known contractor and iron-worker artisan, and an activist for the rights of African Americans. Sampson Easton's father, Hosea Easton, wrote A Treatise On the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States; And the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them; With A Sermon on the Duty of the Church To Them (1837), a short book that suggested that black “uplift” could create a more congenial environment for African Americans only with a dramatic reversal of white prejudice.

While ...

Article

Fisk, Clinton Bowen  

Lois Kerschen

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Clinton Bowen Fisk, the sixth son of Benjamin and Lydia Fisk, was born in Livingston County, New York. His father had been a captain in the army, and his grandfather served as a major general under George Washington. The Fisk family moved to a settlement they called Clinton in Lenawee County, Michigan, while Clinton Bowen was still an infant. Benjamin Fisk died when Clinton was six, however, and Lydia was not able to hold onto the property. At age nine, Clinton Fisk apprenticed himself to a local farmer, but one year later he had to return home because his younger brother died. When Fisk was thirteen, his mother married William Smith, a successful farmer from Spring Arbor, who sent Fisk to Albion Seminary, a Methodist school in Michigan.

Fisk later went into business as a clerk for L. D. Crippen of Coldwater Michigan and married Crippen s ...

Article

Ford, Barney Launcelot  

Maria Elena Raymond

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

, Underground Railroad conductor, barber, and businessman, was born in Stafford County, Virginia, the son of a Mr. Darington (given name unknown), a slaveholder and plantation owner, and Phoebe (surname unknown), one of Darington's slaves. Called “Barney” at birth, he adopted the name Barney Launcelot Ford as an adult to please his soon-to-be wife and to provide himself with a “complete” name.

Ford spent the first quarter-century of his life enslaved. His mother is said to have planted the seeds of education in him as a child by secreting him out of camp at night to meet with sympathetic people who taught him the basics of reading and writing. She may have put herself in mortal danger on many occasions by smuggling in a section of newspaper or a Bible page so that he could practice his studies. Upon his mother's death around 1837 Ford was enslaved on a ...

Article

Gordon, George  

Alonford James Robinson

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

George Gordon was born in Jamaica to a black slave and her wealthy white master. His father, Joseph, devoted more time to running his estate and furthering his political career than he did to his colored son. Like most wealthy whites in Jamaica during the 1820s, Joseph Gordon was both a member of Jamaica's exclusive House of Assembly and a custos in Saint Andrew's Parish—the highest administrative official in the local province.

As the illegitimate son of the slave master, George Gordon learned the importance of self-reliance at an early age, even teaching himself how to read and write. Much to his father's surprise, he showed signs of proficiency in accounting at an early age. By age ten he was a skilled bookkeeper, and around this time Joseph Gordon decided to free his son, sending him to live with his godfather, businessman James Daley, in Black River, Jamaica.

With ...

Article

Gordon, Rose Beatris  

Marcella Sherfy

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

physiotherapist, masseuse, businesswoman, and community organizer, was born in Barker, Montana, the second child and only daughter of Mary Ann Goodlow and John Francis Gordon. Mary had been born a slave in Kentucky in 1853. John, who claimed Zulu heritage, trained to be a chef at Wilberforce University in Ohio. He traveled to Montana Territory from Illinois by steamboat in 1881 to cook on the mining frontier Mary followed a year later In the mid 1880s employed as a chef for the town s primary hotel John purchased a house in the central Montana community of White Sulphur Springs Set in a high pastoral valley White Sulphur Springs was a small commercial hub for outlying mining camps and ranches Its hot springs attracted Indian and European American settlers A decade later while working for a Canadian railroad John was killed in a train ...

Article

Harlan, Robert  

Linda Przybyszewski

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

businessman and politician, was born a slave in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, the son of a slave woman of mixed race. His father was reputedly his owner, James Harlan (1800–1863), a white lawyer, Kentucky politician, and the father of the first justice John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911). However, modern DNA analysis of male descendants from both families revealed no match. While still young, Robert Harlan arrived in Kentucky, where he began attending the public schools that were closed to black children. It seems that the boy's mixed-race heritage was not readily apparent, but he was expelled when the authorities learned of it. He continued his education at home, where James Harlan's older sons tutored him in their lessons despite his status as one of several slaves owned by James Harlan.

Robert Harlan began his business career as either a barber or a shopkeeper in Harrodsburg Kentucky He ...

Article

Holstein, Casper  

H. Zahra Caldwell

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

philanthropist, activist, and numbers banker, was born in the Danish Virgin Islands. Holstein emigrated with his mother to the United States when he was nearly 12 years old. Little is known about his early childhood in the Virgin Islands. He attended high school in Brooklyn, New York, and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1898. He was stationed, for a time, on the islands of his birth. After completing his tour of duty he settled in Harlem in New York City. Holstein began working as a porter and bellhop at a Wall Street brokerage firm. As he swept floors and carried packages he also observed the intricacies of the stock market. He had ambitions that stretched far beyond his work as a porter.

Holstein had arrived in Harlem when the numbers game known as Bolito was a waning but still popular recreational pastime for blacks ...

Article

Johnson, Nathan  

Kathryn Grover

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

abolitionist and entrepreneur, was born in circumstances that are unclear. One undocumented account states that he was born in Virginia; another, simply that he was born into slavery; a third, that he purchased his freedom. It is known that Johnson was in New Bedford on 24 October 1819, the day he married Mary (called Polly) Mingo Durfee Page, who was descended at least in part from the Fall River tribe of Wampanoag Indians.

In 1820 Polly Johnson was working in the home of Charles Waln Morgan, who in June 1819 had come from Philadelphia to New Bedford to marry Sarah Rodman and begin his career as a whaling industry merchant. Nathan Johnson's mother, Emily Brown, who lived with her son in 1850 and was buried with him in New Bedford, claimed to have been born in Philadelphia; so too did his brother Benjamin A ...

Article

Johnson, Nathan  

Lois Kerschen

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

who gave Frederick Douglass his last name. No photograph or sketch of Nathan Johnson is known to exist, and details about his origins are obscure. Although he claimed his birth to have been in 1797 in Philadelphia, some records indicate it was as early as 1794 and possibly in Virginia. Born into slavery, Johnson somehow gained his freedom. Eventually settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he married the widowed Mary J. Mingo Durfee (also known as Mary Page), ten years his senior, on 21 October 1819. Polly, as she was called, ran a confectioner's shop, and Johnson was a caterer. Through the years he invested in many other businesses, including a dry goods store and a bathhouse. By the time Frederick Douglass arrived in New Bedford in 1838, Johnson was a prominent and prosperous citizen.

Johnson was a delegate every year to the convention of free people of color ...

Article

Jones, Edith Mae Irby  

Mary Krane Derr

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

physician and community leader, was born Edith Mae Irby in Conway, Arkansas, to Mattie Irby, a domestic worker, and her husband Robert, a sharecropper. Several childhood experiences—some traumatic—shaped Edith's early choice of medicine as her profession and the relief of racial health disparities as her special focus. When she was only five, an illness rendered her unable to walk for eighteen months. At six she lost her thirteen-year-old sister and almost lost an older brother in a typhoid fever epidemic. She noticed that people who could afford more medical care fared better with the disease. When she was eight a horse-riding accident fatally injured her father.

The year of her father s death a white doctor and his family hired Edith to help care for their eighteen month old child They told Edith that she was highly intelligent and encouraged her to consider a medical career Members ...

Article

Lewis, John Henry  

Cynthia Staples

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
20 May 2021

was born into slavery on a plantation in Enfield, North Carolina. At the conclusion of the Civil War, Lewis left Enfield and traveled north with a Union regiment that was returning to its home base in Concord, New Hampshire. In New Hampshire Lewis honed tailoring skills that would serve him well in later life. By 1880 he made his way to thriving Boston, Massachusetts where he set up business as a merchant tailor. Merchant tailors purchased and maintained the goods and materials necessary to make custom clothing as well as hiring skilled laborers to manufacture the clothing. In prosperous nineteenth-century hubs like Boston, well-made, distinctive clothing was in great demand. Price was not an obstacle to obtaining high quality merchandise. Handsome, articulate, and with an entrepreneurial spirit, Lewis excelled as a merchant, targeting an elite clientele.

With a starting capital of less than one hundred dollars Lewis quickly grew his ...

Article

McDonald, William Madison  

Jason Philip Miller

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

businessman and politician, was born in Kaufman County in the eastern part of Texas to George McDonald, a native Tennessean who had once (reportedly) been owned by the Confederate officer and founder of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest. George was a farmer by trade. McDonald's mother, Flora Scott, was either a former slave or a freewoman, depending on the source. What appears certain is that she was from Alabama and died when McDonald was still very young. His father soon married a woman named Belle Crouch. Education in the family was a matter of great importance; McDonald was in fact named after William Shakespeare and the former U.S. president James Madison. He attended local schools and graduated from high school around 1884 As a young man he took work from a local cattle rancher and lawyer named Z T Adams who discussed the law ...