Alonzo Herndon

Alonzo Franklin Herndon was born on the twenty-sixth of June 1858 at the Frank Herndon plantation at Walton County, Georgia, the son of Sophenie Herndon — an enslaved field hand — and Frank Herndon, the white planter and the plantation owner. He was raised in the plantation slave quarters across the closing seven years of the antebellum period.

He was emancipated at six on the surrender of the Confederate Army at Appomattox Court House of the ninth of April 1865 and was put out by his mother and his white half-brothers from the plantation at the close of the Reconstruction period in 1875.

He walked the seventy miles to Senoia, Georgia at the age of seventeen, and worked the Senoia cotton fields as a sharecropper from 1875 to 1878. He left Senoia at twenty in 1878 with eleven dollars in savings and entered the village barbering trade.

He was apprenticed to a barber by the name of W. D. Hutchins at Senoia in 1878 and ran his own one-chair barbering shop at Jonesboro, Georgia from 1881 to 1882. He moved to Atlanta in 1882 at twenty-four and was hired at the Dougherty Hutchins barbering shop at 11 Wall Street — the principal white-clientele barbering shop of downtown Atlanta of the period.

He bought a partnership in the Hutchins shop in 1886 at twenty-eight and full ownership of the shop in 1893. He expanded across the closing decade of the nineteenth century into three additional Atlanta locations — at the Markham House Hotel, the Norcross Building, and the Crystal Palace at 66 Peachtree Street — the Crystal Palace becoming the largest barbering establishment in the United States with twenty-five barbering chairs.

He accumulated through the barbering profits, the real-estate investments and the loans the principal Black fortune of the post-Reconstruction Atlanta of the closing years of the nineteenth century.

He founded on the sixteenth of September 1905 the Atlanta Life Insurance Company at 148 Auburn Avenue with a capital of twenty-five thousand dollars — incorporating two earlier failed Atlanta Black insurance firms that he had purchased out of receivership. The company was the principal Black-owned insurance company of the American South of the twentieth century and held over four hundred million dollars of assets in force by the time of its 1995 demutualisation.

He died at Atlanta on the twenty-first of July 1927 of complications of stroke, at sixty-nine.

He is honored here as the founder of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company.