Eliza Moore was also one of the last documented slaves in the Unites States. Moore was born in Montgomery County, Alabama, in 1843 and was a slave to a man named Dr. Taylor. She lived at Gilchrist Place, where she and her husband were sharecroppers for between sixty-five and seventy years. At the time of her death in 1948 at the age of 105, she was thought to be one of Montgomery County’s oldest residents, if not the oldest resident. However, her husband was just as blessed with longevity as she was. Ashbury died in 1943, and he too was over a hundred years old.
North Carolina’s last Confederate Civil War veteran to receive a Class B pension from the state was Alfred “Teen” Blackburn, the last living person in North Carolina’s Yadkin County to be counted as a slave. Similarly to Lewis, Redoshi, and Moore, Blackburn is also one of the last living survivors of slavery in the nation to remember slavery as an adult.
According to his family’s accounts, Blackburn was the son of Fannie Blackburn, a biracial Cherokee-African enslaved by Augustus Blackburn, a plantation owner and Confederate colonel in the Civil War. During the Civil War, he served as Augustus’s “body servant” and served Blackburn’s regiment as the cook and help.
His time after the war included various jobs such as farming, working for a local sheriff, and becoming a contract male carrier for the US Postal Service, where he supervised both White and Black workers for sixty years. He also married a well-to-do White woman named Lucy Carson, related to the frontiersman Kit Carson. Together, he and Lucy had ten children, all of whom had formal education due to Blackburn’s tireless work ethic. Blackburn died in 1951 at the age of 108.
George Freeman Bragg was born as a slave in Warrenton, North Carolina, but he and his family very quickly became free after the Civil War. Religion had always been a huge part of Bragg’s upbringing; he was baptized at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, and his family later moved to Petersberg, Virginia, to live with his grandmother Caroline Wiley Cain Bragg, a former slave of an Episcopal priest and a devout Episcopalian herself. Caroline became one of the founding members of Petersberg’s first Black Episcopalian church, St. Steven’s Episcopal Church. Bragg attended St. Stephen’s parochial school until 1870 when he was expelled for a lack of humility. He founded the weekly Black newspaper The Lancet (eventually known as The Afro-American Churchman and the Church Advocate) in 1882 and returned to parochial school in 1885. He was finally ordained as a deacon in 1887 and received his ordination as an Episcopal priest in 1888. Bragg died in 1940.
Dr. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was born into slavery in 1858, but later became one of the nation’s most prominent African American scholars. Known as “the mother of Black Feminism,” she earned her PhD in history from the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1924, making her the fourth Black woman to earn a doctoral degree.
Much of Cooper’s focus was on the importance of keeping African American folklore alive. Because she realized the importance of cataloging the oral tales told by Black families, she cofounded the Washington Negro Folklore Society to collect and preserve these stories. Her book A Voice from the South (1892) is considered the first book about the African American experience from a feminist perspective and focuses on suffrage, poverty, segregation, Black literature, and more. She later became the second president of the Frelinghuysen University, which offered vocational, religious, and academic education for Black working class adults. Even though the school earned and lost its accreditation within the decade of 1927 to 1937, Cooper continued to make the school (renamed the Frelinghuysen Group of Schools for Colored Working People) an avenue for Black Americans to take when advancing their careers. She remained with the school until 1942. She, like Moore, lived to the old age of 105.
Going Forward After Slavery
Although those who were enslaved were stripped of their magnanimous titles and prestige and, indeed, their human rights, they managed to keep their dignity through sheer force of will. It is their survival instinct that is present in Black American history today, and that instinct helped propel many of the country’s inventors, businesspeople, activists, artists, scientists, doctors, eco-warriors, and many more achieve their dreams and change American society in the process.
Much of Black America’s history was affected by the country’s human rights abuses. Clearly, America has not been particularly kind to the Black American. However, even with an entire country set against them, the Africans who were brought to the West as slaves still fought for a better life and many actually achieved it in many disciplines, including business. In the eighteenth and (part of) the nineteenth centuries, it would have been impossible for many to believe that Black men and women could own businesses, employ hundreds or even thousands, and invent some of the most important products America has ever seen.
As a person living in the twenty-first century, it is probably impossible for you to remember a time when there weren’t Black movers and shakers in the world, building businesses, making lucrative deals, and reaching the monetary height of success. We should be thankful for that success, since it’s anecdotal proof that, despite all of the setbacks, our country has made societal progress. Today’s Black businesspeople can look like you and me, setting out into the world of entrepreneurship. Or they can look like bigwig rappers like Jay-Z and P. Diddy, two rappers who were able to transform their music careers into lucrative businesses.
Jay-Z is behind the music distribution company Tidal but has many other companies to his name, such as the urban fashion line Rocawear and the music publishing and artist management/touring company Roc Nation, and he’s part owner of the New Jersey Nets, among other ventures. Diddy, on the other hand, made his most famous business mark with his clothing line Sean John. He has since made inroads in the wine and spirits category with his deals with Diageo’s Ciroc and DeLeon tequila. He also co-owns AQUAhydrate water with Mark Wahlberg and has a stake of Revolt, a popular television network.
Today’s Black entrepreneurs and businesspeople come from all walks of life, from the wealthy to the bootstrappers. It’s great that we live in a time where we have so many examples of Black businessowners that we can be inspired to follow our dreams.
It wasn’t always this way. Many years ago, all we might have heard about were White businesspeople and their achievements, and it would have been tough to find examples of strong Black businesses unless you knew where to look. But they were out there, and they were laying the groundwork for business-minded Black Americans like Jay-Z, P. Diddy, and others to follow behind.
Early Pioneers
Black Americans have been masters at making a way out of no way and creating a decent life for themselves despite everything that was stacked against them. Some, like Benjamin Banneker, went above and beyond and showcased savant-like talents that progressed a nation, even while that same nation was trying to keep him and those like him suppressed. Banneker was born a free man in 1731 Virginia and, as such, he attended Quaker schools. Thanks to the Quaker anti-racist philosophy, he probably grew up in a blessed bubble of protection against the harsh, racist outside world. However, he left school after the second grade and was self-taught afterwards. He was apparently his best teacher, since he excelled in many areas, including