The astonishing untold history of America’s first black millionaires-former slaves who endured incredible challenges to amass and keep maintaining their wealth for a century, in the Jacksonian period towards the Roaring Twenties-self-made entrepreneurs whose unknown success mirrored that of American business heroes such as for example Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison.

While Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Michael Jordan, and can Smith are among the estimated 35,000 black millionaires in the country about Black Fortunes: THE STORYPLOT of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires today, these famous superstars weren’t the first blacks to reach the storied one percent. Between your many years of 1830 and 1927, as the final generation of blacks delivered into slavery was achieving maturity, a little group of wise, tenacious, and daring women and men broke new floor to attain the highest degrees of financial success.

Black Fortunes can be an intriguing take a look at these extraordinary individuals, including Napoleon Bonaparte Drew-author Shomari Wills’ great-great-great-grandfather-the 1st black man in Powhatan State (contemporary Richmond) to possess property in post-Civil War Virginia. His accomplishments were matched by five additional unknown black business owners including:

Mary Ellen Pleasant, who used her Platinum Rush wealth to further the cause of abolitionist John Brown;Robert Reed Chapel, who became the largest landowner in Tennessee;Hannah Elias, the mistress of a New York City millionaire, who used the land her lover gave her to build an empire in Harlem;Orphan and self-taught chemist Annie Turnbo-Malone, who designed the first nationwide brand of hair care products;Madam C. J Walker, Turnbo-Malone’s employee who would earn the nickname America’s ‘1st female black millionaire;’Mississippi school instructor O. W. Gurley, who developed a bit of Tulsa, Oklahoma, right into a ‘town’ for wealthy black specialists and craftsmen’ that could become referred to as ‘the Dark Wall Road.’A clean, little-known chapter in the country’s story-A mixture of Hidden Statistics, Titan, and The Tycoons-Black Fortunes illuminates the delivery of the black business titan and the emergence from the dark marketplace in the us as never before.