A. G. Gaston
A. G. Gaston was born on this date in 1892. He was a Black businessman and financial activist.
Born Arthur George Gaston in a log cabin in racially segregated Demopolis, AL, he never went beyond the 10th grade in school. He moved to Birmingham in 1905 with the Loveman family, who employed his mother as a cook. He served in the army in France during World War I and then went to work in the mines operated by Tennessee Coal & Iron Company in Fairfield, AL. He created a plan to sell lunches to his fellow miners, and once he had enough money, he took on the informal role of banker, extending loans at 25 percent interest to his coworkers. He was an inspiring man who made a way for himself when there seemed to be no way.
Soon, Gaston quit mining to establish the Booker T. Washington Burial Society, which was initially modeled after a fraternal order in 1923. Gaston’s business empire grew to include two radio stations, two cemeteries, and the Citizens’ Federal Savings Bank in downtown Birmingham. In 1938, Gaston extended his business holdings throughout the neighborhood and beyond, opening Smith & Gaston-sponsored gospel music programs on local radio stations. In 1954, Gaston built the A.G. Gaston Motel on the site adjoining Kelly Ingram Park, where the mortuary had once stood.
In addition to his business sense, he had a passion for equality, but he was quiet and discreet about promoting it. In the decade following the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. and his allies used the A. G. Gaston Motel in Birmingham as a haven to plan their activities. By the 1960s, he was one of the wealthiest Black men in America.
Gaston persistently, yet discreetly, promoted voting rights and equal treatment for African Americans. When Eugene “Bull” Connor, the public safety commissioner, had King arrested in 1963, Gaston put up the $160,000 bail from his pocket.
Gaston sold his insurance company in 1987 and worked at his bank until six months before he died in his hometown in 1996. He left behind the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company, the A. G. Gaston Construction Company, and CFS Bancshares, a financial institution. The City of Birmingham owns the A. G. Gaston Motel, which it plans to make into an annex to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, built on the former site of the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company. His net worth was estimated to be more than $ 130 million at the time of his death.
