Arthur George Gaston (
July 4, 1892 --
January 19,
1996) was a businessman who established a number of businesses in
Birmingham, Alabama, and who played a significant role in the struggle to integrate
Birmingham in
1963.
While working in the mines, he hit on the plan of selling lunches to his fellow miners and then branched into loaning money to them at twenty-five percent interest. It was also while working in the mines that he conceived of the idea of offering burial insurance to co-workers. He had noticed that mine widows would come to the mines and to local churches to collect donations in order to bury their husbands and he wondered if people would "give a few dimes into a burial society to bury their dead".[1] As a result,
Gaston formed the
Booker T. Washington Burial Society, which later became the Booker T. Washington
Insurance Company.
Driven out of
Fairfield because of his father-in-law's political differences with the mayor, Gaston and his family moved to Birmingham. Gaston bought and renovated a property on the edge of
Kelly Ingram Park in downtown Birmingham, where, in partnership with his father-in-law, he started the
Smith & Gaston
Funeral Home, in
1938. Smith & Gaston sponsored gospel music programs on local radio stations and launched a quartet of its own.
Realizing that there were not enough blacks with sufficient training to be able to work in the insurance and funeral industries, he and his second-wife established a business school.[1] Other Gaston enterprises included
Citizens Federal Savings and Loan Association, the first black-owned financial institution in Birmingham in more than forty years (reportedly established by Gaston when he saw how difficult it was for blacks to obtain fair loans from white financial companies[1]) and a motel business (reportedly started because of Gaston's concern that blacks traveling through the south during segregation often could not find accommodations[1]). In 1954 Gaston built the
A.G. Gaston motel on the site adjoining
Kelly Ingram park where the mortuary had once stood.
While his father-in-law had been an active supporter of voting rights and his second wife was a founder of the
National Council of Negro Women and an avid advocate for education reform,[1] Gaston himself kept a low political profile through most of the
1940s and
1950s. Although Gaston was reluctant to confront white authorities and the white business establishment directly, Gaston supported the civil rights movement financially.[1] He offered financial support to
Autherine Lucy, who had sued to integrate the
University of Alabama, and had provided financial assistance to residents of
Tuskegee who faced foreclosure because of their role in a boycott of white-owned businesses called to protest their disenfrachisement. When
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a civil rights leader in Birmingham, founded the
Alabama Christian Movement for
Human Rights in the wake of the outlawing of the
NAACP in the
State of Alabama in
1956, the group held its first meeting at Smith & Gaston's offices.
When students at
Miles College, a historically black college in Fairfield, attempted to use sit-in and boycott tactics to desegregate downtown Birmingham in 1962, Gaston used his position as a member of the board of trustees of the institution to dissuade them from continuing their campaign while he pursued negotiations with them. Those negotiations produced some token changes, but no significant progress toward desegregating the stores or hiring black employees.
When the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, represented locally by Rev. Shuttlesworth, proposed to support those students' demands in 1963 by widespread demonstrations, challenging both Birmingham's segregation laws and Local
Police Commissioner Bull Connor's authority, Gaston opposed the plan and tried to deflect the campaign from public confrontation into negotiations with white business leaders. Gaston tried to talk
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. out of going through with the planned
Easter boycott of downtown business and may have bailed him out of jail against his wishes in
April, 1963.
At the same time, Gaston provided
King and Rev.
Ralph Abernathy with rooms at his motel at a discount and free meeting rooms at his offices nearby throughout the campaign. He maintained a public show of support for the campaign and not only took part in the meetings with local business leaders, but insisted that Shuttlesworth be brought in since "he's the man with the marbles".
That unity nearly dissolved, however, after Rev. Abernathy made some comments about unidentified
Uncle Toms and
Dr. King made a call for unity on April 9, 1963 that made it clear that he would press forward with his plans for confrontation. Gaston issued a press release in response in which he obliquely criticized King by lamenting the lack of communication between white business leaders and "local colored leadership."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
A.G._Gaston
- published: 31 Dec 2013
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