Shomari Wills

Millionaires today are no big deal. Half of Congress is millionaires. Not impressed. But the first six black American millionaires is a terrific story. These unlikely individuals started off with huge disadvantages, from race to skin color to illiteracy to being slaves or the children of slaves. That they rose to wealth in such a hostile environment – civil war, reconstruction, Jim Crow – makes them all the more impressive. And half of them were women.

Unlike todays’ millionaires who can set out to make a fortune and just do it, the first six black millionaires often backed into it. Every story is different, every fortune is different. They leveraged the mobility of America, taking advantage of the California gold rush or the Oklahoma land giveaway. They became lenders to help build local businesses that helped them rent their buildings, or in one case, became the kept woman of a white multimillionaire. Their million in assets is worth tens of millions by today’s standards, making it all the more impressive.

Shomari Wills has to be a fine storyteller to fill in the gaps in these largely unrecorded lives, and he is. They come alive in his pages and their stories move quickly. Rather than profile each one alone, his book is chronological. The chapters run from the 1800s to the 1950s. The characters show up in different decades as we pick up their stories again. There is little or no interaction among the players. They were too busy living their own lives to even know about each other, unlike todays’ crop, which constantly gather and socialize.

And none of them made their fortune in office.

My favorite is Mary Ellen Pleasant, who took off for California to track down her man, and ended up with a fortune in real estate, securities and a prominent place in secretly funding John Brown and the Abolitionists. She totally dedicated her fortune to the cause. She was a class act.

There is a shelf of these books now. They tend to make far more interesting biographies for me than the run of the mill. There’s Prince of Darkness – the story of Jeremiah Hamilton, a Wall St. finagler, who shows up in Black Fortunes too, Washington’s Mulatto Man and most recently Black Tudors, all of which I have reviewed and loved. Black Fortunes is yet another, very different and fascinating collection to add to the shelf.

David Wineberg… (mais)