Transcript
Introduction
"Pick any sweltering day in the year 1919. On the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, in a small mining village, hundreds of black men are at work, side by side. Some of the men are convicts, some are war veterans. One of these men is on the verge of taking his first step in the direction of becoming a bona fide millionaire, 100 times over. A.G. Gaston started with next to nothing. His mother was a cook in the kitchen of a prominent white family. He never had more than a 10th grade education.
After the war, he had taken his position in the mines as a means of survival only to emerge utterly determined that his life was worth more than what the mines were offering. That determination was a kind of miracle given the context in which Gaston had been raised. And that miracle is the foundation of the story that you're about to hear."
All right. So that comes from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Black Titan: A. G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire and it's written by Carol Jenkins and Elizabeth Gardner Hines.