Henry G. Parks Jr.

Henry Green Parks Jr. was born on the twenty-ninth of September 1916 at Atlanta, Georgia, the second of three children of Henry Green Parks Sr. — a Pullman porter on the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad — and Ruby Parks. The family moved to Dayton, Ohio in 1924, and he was raised in the Black working-class Dayton of the inter-war period.

He took the bachelor’s in marketing at the Ohio State University at Columbus in 1939 cum laude — among the early Black bachelor’s graduates of the Ohio State marketing programme.

He took employment in 1940 at the Pabst Brewing Company at Milwaukee as a sales representative to the Black grocery and tavern community of the upper Mississippi River valley — among the first Black sales representatives at a major American brewery.

He took employment after the war at the W. B. Graham Associates marketing firm at New York from 1946 to 1949 and at the Joe Louis Distributors soft-drink firm — a Black-owned soft-drink distribution operation backed by the heavyweight champion Joe Louis — as president of the New York operation from 1949 to 1951.

He purchased in 1951 the bankrupt Saint Helena Sausage Company at Pittsburgh — a small Italian-American sausage manufacturer — and moved the operation to Baltimore in October 1951 at the new Parks Sausage Company plant at 4101 Calverton Heights Avenue, Baltimore. The starting capital of the Parks Sausage Company was three thousand five hundred dollars and the initial workforce was Parks himself and two employees.

The Parks Sausage Company sold across the following eighteen years a single line of pork breakfast sausage — the Parks Pure Pork Sausage — under the radio-advertising slogan ‘More Parks Sausages Mom, Please.’ The company surpassed two million dollars in annual sales by 1959 and twelve million dollars by 1969.

Parks Sausage Company conducted on the seventeenth of January 1969 the first public offering of common stock by a Black-owned American corporation, on the over-the-counter market — at an offering price of seven dollars and a half per share, with two hundred and fifty thousand shares offered. The offering was oversubscribed by a factor of three.

He served between 1963 and 1969 as the first Black member of the Baltimore City Council from the Second District — having been elected to the Council on the third of November 1963 — and between 1969 and 1989 as a member of the boards of directors of the Magnavox Corporation, the W. R. Grace and Company, the First Pennsylvania Bank, and the National Black Network broadcasting company.

He died at Towson, Maryland on the fourteenth of April 1989 of complications of cancer, at seventy-two.

He is honored here as the founder of the first publicly traded Black American company.