Anthony Overton

Anthony Overton Jr. was born on the twenty-first of March 1865 at Monroe, Louisiana, the son of Anthony Overton Sr. — a free Black tenant farmer of the antebellum Louisiana Delta cotton belt — and Martha DeLaney Overton. He was emancipated at four days old under the surrender of the Confederate Army of the ninth of April 1865 — the surrender having occurred sixteen days after his birth — and was raised in the Reconstruction-period Monroe, Louisiana Black community of the post-bellum cotton economy.

He was placed at fourteen at the Topeka, Kansas public schools — the family having migrated to Kansas under the Exoduster movement of 1879 — and at twenty-three at the Washburn College at Topeka, completing the bachelor’s in 1888 in liberal arts. He took the LL.B. at the University of Kansas at Lawrence in 1891 and was admitted to the Kansas bar in 1892.

He served as a probate judge of Shawnee County, Kansas from 1892 to 1894 — the first Black probate judge in Kansas history — and as the editor of the Topeka Black newspaper The Times-Observer between 1893 and 1898.

He founded in 1898 at Kansas City, Kansas the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company, on a starting capital of one thousand nine hundred and sixty dollars, manufacturing baking powder under the trade name Hygienic. The company sold by 1909 over six hundred different food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical products under the Overton brands across the American Midwest.

He moved the manufacturing operation in 1911 to the South Side of Chicago and built the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company building at 3619-3627 South State Street, Chicago — the principal Black-owned commercial building on State Street at the time of its completion in 1923.

He co-founded in 1922 the Douglass National Bank of Chicago at the same State Street block — the first nationally chartered Black-owned bank under the United States National Bank Act of 1864 — and the Victory Life Insurance Company at Chicago in 1924. The Victory Life was the first Black-owned life insurance company to operate in the state of New York.

He was the publisher of the Chicago Bee newspaper from 1925 and the Half-Century Magazine — the principal Black women’s magazine of the American Midwest — from 1916 to 1924.

The Douglass National Bank failed in the second Chicago bank-run of November 1932 — at the depth of the Great Depression — and the Victory Life Insurance Company was sold under receivership in 1933, costing Overton the principal portion of his accumulated fortune.

He retained the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company at his death — at a reduced scale of operation — and the Chicago Bee.

He died at Chicago on the third of July 1946 of complications of a stroke, at eighty-one.

He is honored here as the founder of the first nationally chartered Black bank.