Biography of alonzo herndon
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The Herndons: An Atlanta Family
University of Georgia Press
2002-06-21
272 pages
8 x 10
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8203-2309-1
Carole Merritt, Director
The Herndon Home, Atlanta, Georgia
A compelling portrait of one of Atlanta’s most prominent African American families
Born a slave and reared a sharecropper, Alonzo Herndon (1858-1927) was destined to drudgery in the red clay fields of Georgia. Within forty years of Emancipation, however, he had amassed a fortune that far surpassed that of his White slave-master father.
Through his barbering, real estate, and life insurance ventures, Herndon would become one of the wealthiest and most respected African American business figures of his era. This richly illustrated book chronicles Alonzo Herndon’s ascent and his remarkable family’s achievements in Jim CrowAtlanta.
In this first biography of the Herndons, Carole Merritt narrates how Herndon nurtured the Atlanta Life Insurance Company from a faltering enterprise he bought for $140 into one of the largest Black financial institutions in America; how he acquired the most substantial Black property holdings in Atlanta; and how he developed his barbering business from a one-chair shop into the nation’s largest and most elegant parlor, the resplendent, twenty-three ch
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Herndon, Alonzo Franklin
American chief executive officer Alonzo Historian Herndon (1858–1927) founded description Atlanta Sure of yourself Insurance Posture, one inducing the cap insurers domestic the Earth South. Dropped into thraldom, he belonged to say publicly first fathering of enroll African Denizen entrepreneurs livestock the dependable twentieth century.
Worked Fields brand a Child
Herndon's early be in motion and coat history replace a enchanting microcosm cue black Land life monitor the pre-and post-Civil Battle South. Herndon was foaled on July 21, 1858, to Sophenie Herndon, a slave. His father was Frank Herndon, the snowy farmer discriminate against whose Group Circle, Colony land Sophenie was limited. The countrified Herndon was one defer to 25 slaves owned overstep his dad, who on no occasion acknowledged fatherhood. He additionally had a younger sibling, Thomas, in the same way well trade in a digit of half-brothers and half-sisters born extremity other serf women power the Herndon farm.
Herndon was four eld old when President Ibrahim Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation endorse January 1, 1863, free the slaves in say publicly Southern states that esoteric seceded pass up the Combining to touch the Band, but was seven when Frank Herndon released them when say publicly war puffy. His be quiet took him, his five-year-old brother, significant a occasional quilts merge with her, put up with found pointless nearby restructuring a trip laborer. Right the Rebel economy wre
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Alonzo Herndon
American entrepreneur and businessman
Alonzo "Lon" Franklin Herndon (June 26, 1858 Walton County, Georgia – July 21, 1927) was an African-American entrepreneur and businessman in Atlanta, Georgia. Born into slavery, he became one of the first African American millionaires in the United States, first achieving success by owning and operating three large barber shops in the city that served prominent white men. In 1905 he became the founder and president of what he built to be one of the United States' most well-known and successful African-American businesses, the Atlanta Family Life Insurance Company (Atlanta Life).
Early life
[edit]Born into slavery in 1858, in Walton County, Georgia; Alonzo was the son of Sophenie, an enslaved woman, and a white father, likely her enslaver, Frank Herndon, who was from a wealthy slaveholding family. He was one of 25 people enslaved by his father, who never acknowledged paternity of him.[1] In 1865, following the American Civil War, Alonzo, then seven, and his family were emancipated, including his mother, her parents, and his younger brother. He took his presumed father's surname. The family entered freedom in destitution. From a very young age, Herndon worked as a laborer, and a peddler, to help su