A. G. Gaston

Arthur George Gaston (born July 4, 1892 – died January 19, 1996) was an African-American businessman who established a number of businesses in Birmingham and who played a significant role in the struggle to integrate Birmingham in 1963.

Born in Demopolis, he moved to Birmingham in 1905. He served in the army in France in World War I, then went to work in the mines run by Tennessee Coal & Iron Co. in Fairfield. He hit on the plan of selling lunches to his fellow miners, then branched into loaning money to them at twenty-five percent interest. While still working at the mine he began offering burial insurance to co-workers and to the community at large. In the 1920s he founded, with his father-in-law, the mortuary firm of Smith & Gaston Funeral Home.

Driven out of Fairfield because of his father-in-law's political differences with the mayor, he bought property on the edge of Kelly Ingram Park in downtown Birmingham, where he moved the Smith & Gaston business, in 1938. Gaston extended his business holdings throughout the neighborhood and beyond, opening a savings and loan in the early 1950s, the first black-owned financial institution in Birmingham in more than forty years. Smith & Gaston sponsored gospel music programs on local radio stations and launched a quartet of its own. 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, Gaston himself had kept a low political profile through most of the 1940s and 1950s. 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 to protest their disenfrachisement. When Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth 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.

Gaston was far more reluctant to confront white authorities and the white business establishment directly. When students at Miles College, a historically black college in Fairfield, attempted to use the 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 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 Tom's" 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".

That press release exposed a significant rift between the activists in the movement. Rev. Shuttlesworth described Gaston as a "super Uncle Tom" to the press while complaining that he overcharged for his motel rooms. The leaders of the movement were eager, however, to avoid any public airing of those differences; Shuttlesworth soon apologized, SCLC leaders treated the press release as an expression of support for their campaign while Dr King announced creation of a special committee of local leaders, including Gaston, to meet every morning to approve each day's plans.

That committee had no real power, however, as became clear when the movement encouraged school children to march against segregation on May 2, 1963. Gaston protested the strategy, telling King "Let those kids stay in school. They don't know nothing." King replied, "Brother Gaston, let those people go into the streets where they'll learn something." The demonstrations continued.

Unknown persons attempted to blow up the part of the Gaston motel where King and Abernathy were staying on May 12, 1963. Later that day Alabama State Police dispatched to clear Kelly Ingram Park invaded the motel, clubbing those who could not escape. Unidentified persons later threw firebombs at Gaston's house, a day after he and his wife had attended a state dinner at the White House with President Kennedy.

Gaston remained disaffected from Dr King, urging him to stay away, in a statement released in September, 1963, after Dr King announced plans to return to Birmingham to resume demonstrations. As it turns out, Dr King did not revive the campaign.

Gaston died at age 103. He left behind three companies, the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company, A. G. Gaston Construction, and CFS Bancshares. The City of Birmingham owns the motel, which it plans to make into an annex to the Civil Rights Institute, which was built on the site of the old insurance building. His net worth was estimated to be more than $130,000,000 at the time of his death.

References

• "A.G. Gaston." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 12 Mar 2006, 01:12 UTC. 29 Mar 2006, 22:37 [1].
• Carol, Jenkins; Elizabeth Gardner Hines (December 2003). Black Titan, A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire. New York: One World/Ballantine. ISBN 0345453476.
• Branch, Taylor (1988). Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954 -1963. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0671687425.