A. G. Gaston

Arthur George Gaston was born on the fourth of July 1892 at Demopolis, Alabama, the grandson of formerly enslaved Black-belt Alabama field hands and the son of Tom Gaston, a railway brakeman, and Rosie McDonald Gaston, a domestic worker. He was raised by his grandparents in the Demopolis log cabin in which he had been born.

He was placed at five at the Demopolis Coloured School and at eight relocated with his mother to Birmingham, Alabama — where his mother had taken employment at the household of the Loveman department-store family. He completed the secondary education at the Tuggle Institute at Birmingham in 1910 and took two years of further education at the Carnegie Library Business School at Birmingham in 1910 and 1911.

He served the United States Army in the closing year of the First World War in the 92nd Infantry Division at the western front of France and the Argonne Forest offensive of October–November 1918.

He returned to Birmingham in 1919 and took employment at the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company subsidiary mine at Westfield, Alabama as a coal-miner labourer for the following four years. He sold during the same period peanut and box-lunch concessions to the mining workforce as a sideline and lent small amounts from the proceeds to fellow miners at the customary fifty-cent-per-dollar-per-payday rate.

He founded in 1923 at the close of the Westfield mining period the Booker T. Washington Burial Society — a Black mutual-benefit burial-insurance company at Birmingham. The Burial Society was reorganised in 1932 as the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company, the principal Black-owned insurance company of the state of Alabama across the inter-war period and the post-war period.

He co-founded in 1939 the Booker T. Washington Business College at Birmingham — among the principal Black business schools of the American South of the period — the Brown Belle Bottling Company at Birmingham in 1939, the Smith and Gaston Funeral Directors at Birmingham in 1938, the New Grace Hill Cemetery at Birmingham in 1947, the A. G. Gaston Construction Company in 1949, the Vulcan Realty and Investment Company in 1952, and the Citizens Federal Savings and Loan Association at Birmingham in 1957.

He was the principal Black underwriter of the Birmingham Campaign of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of April and May 1963 — supplying the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive) and the SCLC with the Gaston Motel as the campaign’s operating headquarters and standing surety for the bail bonds of the demonstrators. The Gaston Motel was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan on the eleventh of May 1963.

He accumulated by the time of his death a personal fortune of approximately one hundred and thirty million dollars — the rough equivalent of three hundred million dollars in the dollars of the current period — and a Gaston Companies valuation of approximately the same.

He died at Birmingham on the nineteenth of January 1996 of natural causes, at one hundred and three.

He is honored here as the underwriter of the Birmingham Campaign.