The Top 10 Black-Owned Businesses of All Time

Is it possible to run a successful profitable business without adopting the worst parts of capitalism? Well, Black people actually did it.

If Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist, then how did he become a billionaire?

Growing up, I assumed MLK was the richest Black man who ever lived. According to my calculations, he earned most of his fortune from his lucrative chain of Black-owned funeral franchises (which was obviously why his face was on 73% of church fans). Plus, every Black household had a portrait of King with two of the wealthiest nepo babies in history—John F. Kennedy Jr. and Jesus (whose father was rich in houses and land). The velvet painting endorsement deal had to be at least eight figures.

It turns out, I was wrong about MLK’s embalming empire and his church endorsement deal. Although King believed that “capitalism has outlived its usefulness,” he regularly advocated for the support of “negro-owned banks.” In his last public address, King explained that supporting Black-owned businesses was the first step on the path to economic independence.

But what are the greatest Black-owned businesses of all time?

While we could argue forever about whether Motown is more important than the Jordan brand, we wanted to rank the kinds of Black-owned businesses. To create our list, we used the following criteria:

• Historical impact: Even if the industry or business no longer exists, how important was it at the time it existed?

• Cultural impact: Did the industry fill a need that was missing in Black communities?

• Economic impact: Rather than hoarding profit, how did Black people benefit economically and financially?

• Legacy: How are the companies and the individual members remembered today?

While we included unlicensed businesses and underground operations, for obvious reasons, we excluded criminal enterprises and lone hustlers like the guy who sells bootleg DVDs at barbershop.

The resulting list is not about money; it shows something more.

Not only have Black-owned businesses been a staple of Black communities since Black communities existed, but history is also replete with examples of Black people who achieved financial and economic success without sacrificing their values or exploiting their communities. In fact, Black-owned businesses actually disprove the myth that adopting the predatory, ruthless ways of capitalism is the only way to achieve what white people call “The American Dream.”

Here are a few people who did it right.

10. Candy Ladies

Unlike bodega owners, corner-store proprietors and traveling Jolly Rancher salesmen, candy ladies don’t operate out of storefronts. Also known as “residential retailers,” the Institute for Domestic Executives, Candy Ladies and Residential Entrepreneurs (I DECLARE) defines a candy lady as anyone who sells more than five packs of Now & Laters in the same home where they live. And, contrary to popular belief, loose-leaf Oreos, Chico Sticks and Mike & Ike cookies account for less than 22% of candy lady sales. The real profit margin comes from mass-producing frozen Kool-Aid cups, loosie cigarettes and homemade cakes and pies.

While this industry has traditionally been dominated by usher board members, Black men have made a significant impact in the candy lady industry. In fact, Middleton Tobacco recently settled a class-action lawsuit with the International Brotherhood of Candymen (no relation to the Sammy Davis Jr. song) over the theft of their idea to sell individual Black & Milds.

Candy ladies were doing it first.

Greatest Candy Lady of All Time: The Saxton Contraband Camp Store

During the Civil War, white Union soldiers discovered their superiors were paying a Black woman who lived in the contraband camp located in Beaufort, S.C. Instead of raising a fuss, she renounced the Army’s under-the-table stipend. Instead, she went “to her little cabin, and made about fifty pies, a great quantity of gingerbread, and two casks of root beer.” For the remainder of the Civil War, the sole proprietor made money by selling her products to her fellow officers. And because she was self-employed, the Combahee Ferry Raid was technically sponsored by one of the most famous candy ladies of all time:

Harriet Tubman.

9. Shadetree Mechanics

I once watched my neighbor Coot rebuild the engine of a 1993 Ford Probe under a highway bridge during a thunderstorm for $80 and a six-pack of Miller High Life.

Also known as negrophysicists and hoodustrial engineers, every Black neighborhood has a shadetree mechanic. Although they’re sought after for their automotive expertise, these autodidacts can repair anything with a pair of needle-nosed pliers, duct tape and a Phillips-head screwdriver.

Elijah McCoy invented the oiling machine for steam engines that became known as “the real McCoy” in his home workshop. Lonnie Johnson left NASA to form his own engineering firm and invented the Super Soaker. After Hobart Taylor Sr. sold an invention for an air-cooled engine with shock absorbers to Chrysler, he used his money to fund the campaign to eliminate the poll tax. When he introduced his son to Lyndon Johnson, Hobart Taylor Jr. helped author Executive Order 11246 and inserted a phrase to combat racial discrimination.

“Affirmative Action.”

Greatest Shadetree Mechanic of All Time: The Morgan Skirt Factory

Garrett Morgan wins this one hands down.

He learned so much while working in a sewing machine repair shop; he opened his own shop and invented the attachment for zig-zag stitching. Then he invented one of the first hair relaxers. Then he opened a clothing factory. But when he heard about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, he wanted to protect his workers, so he invented the ”safety hood,” which served as the prototype for the U.S. Army’s gas masks.

He was one of the first Black men in Cleveland to own an automobile, but he was worried about white people running into his “sweet ride.”

So he invented the traffic signal.

8. Party Promoters

Whether it’s Nat Turner’s slave revolt or a night out at the club, getting people to show up and show out has always been a lucrative business.

If Cindy Campbell wasn’t there to promote her little brother’s parties, Kool Herc might not be remembered as a hip-hop pioneer. Pat Chappelle’s Rabbit Foot Company put Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and the Neville Brothers on the map. Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin and Redd Foxx wouldn’t be mainstream stars without the Theater Owners’ Booking Association. Also known as the “chitlin circuit,” the organization was founded by Sherman Dudley after he retired from vaudeville.

Nightclubs and entertainment venues aren’t the only parties worth promoting. The March on Washington wasn’t King’s idea; he was just the headliner. He wasn’t even at the first Selma-to-Montgomery March organized by Dallas County Voters League President Amelia Boynton. “We did not choose them,” explained Andrew Young of SCLC. “They chose us.”

The Greatest Party Promoter of All Time: Asa Philip Randolph

What is a protest but a party?

When Asa Philip Randolph threatened to bring "ten, twenty, fifty thousand Negroes on the White House lawn," Franklin Roosevelt signed the executive order that desegregated the defense industry. Eighteen thousand people showed up to his mass meeting at Madison Square Garden to fight employment discrimination. Harry Truman desegregated the military in 1948 after Randolph told Black men to refuse to register for the draft. Thirty thousand showed up for his Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington to fight resistance to school integration. He mentored E.D. Nixon, who led the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Most importantly, he was the architect of the biggest Black party ever: The March on Washington.

7. The Original ‘Boardrooms’

Where do you find refuge if you’re a family traveling through the segregated South, a civil rights leader planning a huge protest or a fugitive who freed himself from slavery?

The Black Airbnb.

After restaurants, Black-owned rooming homes were the second-most common listing in the Green Book. And, despite what your white social studies teacher told you, most self-emancipated runaways didn’t hide out in white abolitionists' basements. Many stayed in Black-owned boarding houses, such as Benjamin “Pap” Singleton's in Detroit or Harriet and Lewis Hayden’s in Boston.

Black hotels and boarding houses didn’t just offer safety and security for Black travelers; in many cases, they were owned and operated by Black freedom fighters. Tunis Campbell literally wrote the manual for running a first-class hotel long before he oversaw the distribution of 40 acres and a mule and built Georgia’s Black power political base. J.B. Stradford owned the largest Black-owned hotel in America before he grabbed his rifle to confront the lynch mob that would destroy Tulsa’s Black Wall Street.

Unfortunately, white people knew this. It’s why terrorists bombed MLK’s room at the AG Gaston Motel in Birmingham and assassinated him on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. In fact, when a bunch of powerful white men needed a place to decide the 1876 election and devise an agreement that would usher in Jim Crow, they chose the Black-owned Wormley Hotel in Washington D.C.

That’s why the Compromise of 1877 is called the “Wormley Agreement.”

Greatest Boardroomer of all time: Mary Ellen Pleasant

One of the wealthiest Black women in American history, Mary Ellen Pleasant’s laundries and boarding houses were part of a fortune worth nearly a billion dollars in today’s money. She helped fund the Underground Railroad, hired fugitive slaves and funded lawsuits that defeated California’s segregation laws.

Just before she died, she revealed that she was the person who secretly funded John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.

6. Fly Girls (and Guys)

We stay fly.

Long before Celie Harris Johnson opened the iconic pants boutique that changed women’s fashion, Black clothiers were keeping our communities so fresh and so clean. The cowboy hat came from us. Blue jeans came from us. Dry cleaning came from us. The predecessor of the washing machine was invented by a Black woman, Ellen Elgin.

Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity helped fashion designer Ann Lowe open a shop on Madison Avenue in New York in 1928, 25 years before she designed Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress. When rappers started patronizing a small clothing shop called Dapper Dan’s Boutique, luxury brands didn’t even sell clothing or shoes. Now they do. Rosa Parks was carrying a dress she designed when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus.

While historians don’t know the name of the first artist to airbrush a picture of a recently deceased cousin ascending to the clouds with angel wings, they generally agree on one fact:

He rests in power.

Flyest girl of all time: Elizabeth Keckley

Elizabeth Keckley was so fly that she got an enslaved man to buy her freedom…

So she could leave him.

At the time when free Black people had to purchase a license to live in Washington, D.C., the mayor gave her a license free of charge. Even racist white people wanted to buy her clothes. When Robert E. Lee’s wife wore one of her dresses to a dinner party for the Prince of Wales, she had to hire 20 seamstresses. She was the personal stylist for Jefferson Davis’ wife. When the Davises had to leave town because of that race war thing, Keckley started working for the wife of another politician:

Mary Todd Lincoln.

She’s wearing Keckley’s designs in nearly every picture you've ever seen of Mary Todd Lincoln. Keckley introduced President Lincoln to Sojourner Truth and donated Mary’s inauguration gown to Wilberforce University. And in 1862, she and 40 Black women started a charity for self-emancipated slaves and even convinced the Lincolns to make the first donation to the new nonprofit:

The Contraband Relief Association.

5. Beauty Suppliers

When Black women win, the entire community wins. And, aside from being buddies with Oprah, no other industry has elevated Black women to financial success more than the beauty and hair industry.

The Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company didn’t just make Sarah Breedlove a millionaire; it was a “race company”—a Black-owned business that was founded for the betterment of Black communities. Annie Malone’s products and her cosmetology classes at Poro College offered financial freedom to tens of thousands of Black women (and at least one Black grad named Chuck Berry). Anthony Overton’s international cosmetics empire employed over 400 people and helped open a bank, an insurance company, a magazine, a newspaper and a real estate company.

The Greatest Beauty Supplier of All Time: Johnson Products Company

The company behind Ultra Sheen was considered one of the most successful Black-owned businesses in America. Founded by Joan and George E. Johnson in 1954, it controlled 80% of the Black hair-care market by the mid 1960s. In 1971, it became the first Black-owned and operated company to be listed on a major stock exchange. That same year, it began marketing its Afro Sheen product by taking a local music variety show to national syndication.

It was called Soul Train.

Besides helping to popularize the natural hair movement, JPC’s marketing efforts helped launch the first Black-owned advertising agency, Vince Cullers Advertising. The company’s “Watu Wazuri” jingle (Swahili for “beautiful people”) also gave a young musician the confidence and creative freedom to create a band called “Earth, Wind & Fire.”

4. Funeral Homes

The Black-owned funeral home is not just the largest provider of church fans in America; they are the epitome of a successful business built on serving Black communities.

Black funeral homes served as planning grounds for the Civil Rights Movement. They printed the detailed obituaries that spouses and children of Black veterans used to obtain insurance payouts and VA benefits. A.G. Gaston was a mortician before he became the tycoon who funded the Civil Rights Movement. Charles Diggs worked at his family’s funeral home before he founded the Congressional Black Caucus. I discovered Kwanzaa at the Young and Young Funeral Home.

The Ross-Clayton Funeral Home in Montgomery, Ala., used their hearses to take voters to the polls, drive people to meetings and transport people to the doctor during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1963, Louisiana state troopers led a bloodthirsty mob in a door-to-door hunt for James Farmer, one of the organizers of the March on Washington. He escaped in a hearse owned by a Black funeral director in Plaquemine, La., who convinced Farmer to play dead.

Greatest Funeral Home of All Time: A.A. Rayner & Sons

On April 2 1982, the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. attorney general, the Department of Defense and the city of Chicago signed a consent decree that essentially outlawed COINTELPRO. Besides the lump sum settlement, the Alliance to End Repression prevented the Chicago P.D. and federal agencies from infiltrating, surveilling and harassing nonviolent groups engaged in activities protected by the First Amendment.

What does this have to do with a funeral home?

Well, Ahmed A. “Sammy” Rayner Jr. might be the most surveilled Black man in American history.

After passing the background check to become a Tuskegee Airman, the U.S. Army selected Rayner for the 477th Bombardment Group—America’s first and only team of all-Black bomber pilots. But because the group showed a “pattern of resistance” against racial apartheid, Rayner returned to his Chicago hometown, having never completed a mission. In 1947, he opened A.A. Rayner & Sons Funeral Home and, in 1967, he was elected alderman of Chicago’s 6th Ward.

But that’s not why the government was surveilling Rayner.

Years before Rayner helped Black Panther Bobby Rush become a U.S. Congressman, the Panthers helped him get elected to the city council. When the Chicago Police Department’s Red Squad snuck into an apartment and killed Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton, the apartment that served as the Panthers’ Chicago headquarters was in Rayner’s name. The independent autopsy that confirmed Hampton was murdered in his sleep was performed at A.A. Rayner & Sons. “Sammy Rayner can give the Black community is a new political dignity,” wrote Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton. “This very act of defiance threatens the status quo, because there is no predicting its ultimate outcome.”

But The Death of Innocence by Mamie Till-Mobley best explains why the COINTELPRO program was obsessed with Rayner:

I told Mr. Rayner I wanted an open-casket funeral. He looked at Emmett, that horribly distorted face, then he looked back at me. He asked me if I was sure. I was never more certain of anything. He asked me if I wanted him to retouch Emmett. If I wanted him to work on my son. If I wanted to make him more presentable. I shook my head. “No,” I said. That was the way I wanted him presented. “Let the world see what I’ve seen.”

…I knew that if they walked by that casket, if people opened the pages of Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender, if other people could see it with their own eyes, then together we might find a way to express what we had seen.

In many ways, the Civil Rights Movement began inside a Black-owned funeral home.

3. Black Media

“We wish to plead our case. Too long have others spoken for us.”

Those were the first words of Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned and operated newspaper in America. Started by John Brown Russwurm and Samuel Cornish in 1827, it paved the way for the more than 40 Black-owned newspapers that existed before the Civil War began. Not only did these Black-owned businesses inform and educate Black Americans, but they were also the only places that allowed us to inform white Americans about their own country.

“Little dreamed the ingenious Eli Whitney, when riveting the teeth on his admirable invention, the cotton gin, that he was at the same time riveting the fetters on the slave, and the foulest of institutions on the framework of American society,” explained the June 23, 1848, issue of The North Star. The article was filled with statistics showing how America’s economy was built entirely off cotton and the slave labor that produced it.

Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called the Negro press “the most powerful single factor in shaping the ideas and actions of Negro America.” King said, “It is one major voice of the conscience of our nation,” adding that “its greatest contribution is not to the Negro really, but rather to America, which cannot be at peace with itself until all men are free.”

MTV and white radio wouldn’t initially play rap music. Without Black radio stations and BET, hip-hop couldn’t have become the world’s biggest music genre. Tom Joyner’s morning show woke us up and Kathy Hughes’ “Quiet Storm” put us to sleep.

By recruiting Black readers to the fight against fascism at home and abroad, the Pittsburgh Courier’s Double V Campaign during World War II helped turn the tide of the war. The Chicago Defender sparked the Great Migration and reshaped the demographics of almost every major city. Black journalists wrote the words, told the stories and took the photos that desegregated Major League Baseball, the NFL and America itself.

The Greatest Black Media Outlet of All Time: The Other JPC

Frederick Douglass was a great orator, but he only published The North Star for three years. While BET founder Robert L. Johnson was a better businessman, he had almost zero speeches about slavery or the Fourth of July. Even though Ida B. Wells is undoubtedly the greatest journalist of all time, a white mob destroyed the Memphis Free Speech, and no surviving copies exist. Plus, this is about businesses.

There’s only one choice.

Johnson Publishing Company is the greatest Black media outlet of all time.

John H. Johnson didn’t build a great media empire. In 1942, he used his mother’s furniture as collateral for a $500 loan to print the first edition of The Negro Digest. Within six months, the magazine was selling 50,000 copies per month. He used the profits to launch Ebony magazine in 1945. The first edition sold out completely.

He hired writers like Lerone Bennett Jr., who broke the story about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings decades before it was verified through DNA testing. In fact, Bennett’s groundbreaking book, Before the Mayflower, started as a series of columns in Ebony. The now-famous picture of a young man drinking from a whites-only soda fountain was taken by then-18-year-old civil rights photographer Cecil Williams, who was on assignment for Jet.

Primary Sources: The Man Who Shot Jim Crow

You might be too young to remember how the Ebony Fashion Fair had every church group and civic organization organizing their own fashion shows. You might not know that JPC’s internationally known makeup line for Black women was selling out at Macy’s and Neiman Marcus decades before Fenty. Then again, you probably don’t know that the Jet Beauty of the Week was the first Instagram model.

JPC is how we know what happened to Emmett Till and how we followed the Civil Rights Movement when white outlets wouldn’t. It was our TV Guide, our Page Six and our Vogue. Essence Fest wouldn’t exist without it. BET couldn't exist without it.

Hell, I might not exist without it.

2. The Insurance Company

What was the largest Black-owned business in America for most of the 20th century? How did John H. Johnson get the money to start Ebony? How did Atlanta get a Black middle class? When Martin Luther King Jr went to the Mountaintop, why did he go to an insurance company And what does any of this have to do with affirmative action?

The first Black-owned insurance companies were founded as mutual aid societies. A year before America ratified the Constitution, Philadelphia’s Free African Society started collecting a “one shilling in silver Pennsylvania currency a month” to fund medical care and burial benefits. Richmond’s United Fountain of True Reformers was a mutual benefit society that became an insurance company and a bank. One of the members, John Merrick, organized a few investors to form North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association as a land development company and a mutual aid society. Together, they built Durham’s all-Black Hayti, which was also known as “Black Wall Street.”

Initially, these companies were not profit-making ventures. They were originally a form of collective ownership cooperative economics. By pooling resources, they enabled Black people to care for the sick, bury the dead, support widows and orphans and educate their communities.

“You have six or seven Black insurance companies here in the city of Memphis,” King said in his final speech. “We want to have an ‘insurance-in.’”

The Greatest Insurance Company of All Time: The Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance

This one’s not even close.

In 1951, Dr. T.R.M. Howard, the chief surgeon at the Taborian Hospital—the first hospital built exclusively for and by Black people—purchased a controlling interest in Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance. As soon as he bought the company, Howard hired a young, out-of-work Alcorn State grad to sell policies to poor Black sharecroppers. As he traveled throughout the Mississippi Delta, the new salesman convinced his customers to sign a document that had nothing to do with life and health insurance.

Medgar Evers was registering people to vote.

Magnolia Mutual was essentially a front for the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a Black activist incubator that the Pittsburgh Courier estimated to “represent 500,000 negroes, either directly or indirectly.” Wholly funded by Magnolia Mutual, four of the RCNL’s six officers were on the board of directors at Magnolia Mutual, according to Howard’s biography. Every year, thousands of young activists attended the organization’s annual conference that essentially trained the leaders of what would become the Civil Rights Movement.

For instance, after Bayard Rustin went to India to study with Gandhi, Magnolia Mutual paid him to teach RCNL members a technique he called “nonviolent resistance.” Magnolia Mutual funded the Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Rest Room boycott, which inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The RCNL conference is where a young sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer was “first exposed to activism.” It’s also where she met Magnolia Mutual’s full-time secretary, Aaron Henry. Together, they founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Hamer would become the first Black woman to run for Congress, and Henry would serve 15 years in the Mississippi House of Representatives.

Because of the RNCL's radical ideology, Thurgood Marshall hated Howard. But two days before the Brown v. Board decision was announced, Marshall was delivering a speech at the third annual RCNL, which was sponsored by Magnolia Mutual.

By the way, if you’re wondering how much money Howard lost trying to help Black people, the company had $7,000 in revenue the year before Howard purchased it.

In 1955, it made $900,000.

On Sept. 19, 1955, NAACP field officer Ruby Booker, Jet magazine journalist Simeon Booker, Baltimore Afro-American reporter James Hicks and L. Alex Wilson of the Chicago Defender were summoned to Mound Bayou. Although they were in Mississippi covering the same story, they had no idea who had summoned them or why they were there.

They were about to find out who killed Emmett Till.

“Surprise witnesses believed to possess firsthand knowledge of an explosive nature in the trial of two white men accused of killing Emmett (Bobo) Till were being subpoenaed by the state when court opened Wednesday morning,” Wilson reported. “These writers learned late Sunday evening from a reliable source that several tenant farmer witnesses had been found in Sunflower County. Details about them were withheld to allow a national organization to… arrange if necessary for the safety of the witnesses.”

The name of the “reliable source” and the unnamed organization would eventually be revealed years later:

The Howard home also had an uninvited guest. He was Frank Young, an ordinary plantation worker who had traveled some distance. Arriving around midnight on Sunday the day before the trial, he insisted on talking with Howard. He had a remarkable story to tell. Young reported that he had direct evidence linking Milam and Bryant to the crime…

Much later that evening Howard participated in a strategy meeting, at the the office of the Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company, in Mound Bayou to decide how to move forward on the new evidence. Those attending included Booker, Hicks, Hurley, and L. Alex Wilson of the Chicago Defender. They agreed to contact trusted white reporters who would, in turn, act as intermediaries with law enforcement officials.

– T.R.M. Howard: Doctor, Entrepreneur, Civil Rights Pioneer

Mound Bayou is the place where we found out who was responsible for the murder that started the civil rights era.

But because of Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance, we were prepared to do something about it.

1. The Black Barbershop

The Black barbershop is one of the most important, most revolutionary institutions in Black history.

Because they were often among the few places where they could talk freely without white people around, they were places where men and women could build community and share secrets. Some actually earned enough to buy their freedom and even open their own businesses. Many purchased the freedom for other enslaved people and hid runaways.

Take John Hope, who pioneered the low Caesar.

No, seriously. Known as "Barber Caesar," Hope was famous for cutting white people’s hair and making their powdered wigs. Virginia’s colonial legislature manumitted him at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, hoping the story of their benevolence would convince enslaved people in the area not to fight for the British. As soon as he was freed, he started telling his Black customers: “I know how y’all could be freed.”

When Philly chose a delegate to the First National Negro Convention, they’d choose the second-richest man in the city, Joseph Cassey, a Black barber who created a scholarship for Black students, tried to open the first HBCU and built one of the first Black private libraries. Underground Railroad conductor James Poindexter was known to recite Shakespeare as he rowed Kentucky’s runaways across the Ohio River. After his 1907 death, newspapers said, “he had been identified with the cause of the negro longer than any other man in America.”

One of the Underground Railroad’s private riverboats (there were actually more than one) dropped escapees off at John J. Minor’s shop in Portsmouth, Ohio. Another barber, George DeBaptiste, helped fund the network while working at the White House. John Merrick used his earnings as a barber to build a hospital, a Black-owned bank, a library and the most successful Black-owned business in America.

A Black barbershop is actually a church
It is also a political headquarters
It is a secret hideout and gathering spot

Yet, somehow, the white people at so-called Supercuts are befuddled when I ask for a low Caesar with a bald fade.

The Greatest Black Barbershop of All Time: Moses Dickson’s Traveling Barbershop

Everything you read in this article can be traced back to one Black barber named Moses Dickson.

Dickson is how T.R.M. Howard got to Mound Bayou, which is how the facility where A.A. Rayner trained to become a Tuskegee Airman was built. He is the barber behind the biggest mutual aid society in Black history, and how Lincoln got the courage to write the Emancipation Proclamation. He organized the Underground Railroad funding, recruited Harriet Tubman’s customers and tried to stop John Brown from wasting Mary Ellen Pleasant’s money.

But we’ve already told the story of Moses Dickson’s national slave revolt.

You should still read it, though.