A.G. Gaston

Arthur George Gaston was born on July 4, 1892, in Demopolis, Alabama. His mother, Rosie, was a cook. His father, Tom Gaston, died when Arthur was an infant. His grandmother, Idella Gaston, had been enslaved on a plantation near Demopolis. She raised him. He attended a one-room Black school through the tenth grade, which was the terminal grade available to him.

He went to Tuskegee Institute for a short period, enough to absorb Booker T. Washington's doctrine of economic self-sufficiency as the ground under civil rights. The doctrine would show in the name of almost every institution he founded.

In 1917 he enlisted in the Army. He served in France with the 367th Infantry Regiment, part of the 92nd Division, a segregated unit of Black American soldiers. He returned to Alabama in 1919 and went to work in the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad mines in Fairfield, outside Birmingham.

He noticed what the mines paid and what Black families could not afford. A miner who died without burial insurance left his family a debt. Gaston started a small cooperative among his fellow miners, fifty cents a month, to guarantee a funeral for any member. Members multiplied. In 1923 he incorporated the cooperative as the Booker T. Washington Burial Society. In 1932 it became the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company.

From the insurance company everything else grew. If the company paid for funerals, the company needed funeral homes. Smith and Gaston Funeral Homes became the largest Black-owned funeral business in the state. If Black Birmingham needed clerks and bookkeepers trained for his companies, the Booker T. Washington Business College (founded 1939) would train them. The ecosystem was deliberate.

In 1954 he and his second wife, Minnie L. Gardner Gaston, an educator, began assembling the application for a charter to open a Black-owned savings bank. The Alabama banking regulators slow-walked the approval through the late 1950s. The charter finally issued in 1957. Citizens Federal Savings Bank became the first Black-owned bank chartered in Alabama since Reconstruction. Branches opened on the 4th Avenue corridor in Birmingham's historic Black business district.

He built the A.G. Gaston Motel on that same corridor in 1954. It was a full-service hotel with a restaurant, a lounge, and a rooftop patio. It was the only first-class accommodation in Birmingham open to Black travelers. It housed touring musicians, visiting businessmen, and civil-rights organizers.

In April 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference moved the Birmingham Campaign into the Gaston Motel. Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and the campaign staff worked out of Room 30. Gaston hosted them. He also pressed them in private to calibrate the pace of the demonstrations to what the city's Black business community could absorb. The private pressure and the public welcome coexisted.

King was arrested on Good Friday, April 12, 1963. From the Birmingham jail he wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail in the margins of a newspaper Gaston's attorneys had smuggled in. Gaston drew $160,000 from Citizens Federal Savings to post bail for King and for hundreds of other demonstrators arrested during the Children's Crusade that followed. He did not hold a press conference. He signed the check.

On May 11, 1963, Klansmen bombed the Gaston Motel. They also attempted to bomb the home of King's brother and, days later, Gaston's own home. The motel bombing is one of the events President Johnson cited in pushing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. Gaston reopened the motel and continued operations.

Criticism from more militant factions of the movement through the 1960s described him as incrementalist. He answered with money. He funded bail, scholarships, legal defense, and the printing costs of civil-rights pamphlets through his companies. He did not change his speech. He changed the balance sheet that paid for the speech.

He lived another thirty-three years. He died on January 19, 1996, at 103. At the time of his death the Gaston family of businesses employed more than a thousand people and was valued above $130 million. His great-nephew John F. Pemberton succeeded him as CEO of Booker T. Washington Insurance.