The Fortune Builders — Lewis, Johnson, and Gaston
Part V of The Inheritance, and the closest to home: Reginald Lewis and the Beatrice deal, John H. Johnson and the Ebony empire, A. G. Gaston and his Birmingham century — three documented roads from segregation-era America to serious capital.
Every fortune in this series so far was built at a distance — across oceans, across centuries. This one was built within living memory, by men whose grandchildren are in boardrooms today.
Reginald Lewis closed the Beatrice deal in 1987 and made his company, in the reporting of the time, the first Black-owned business to pass a billion dollars in sales. John H. Johnson started with a $500 loan against his mother’s furniture and built Ebony and Jet into the mirror in which Black America saw itself.
A. G. Gaston started with a burial society for Alabama miners and built, piece by piece, the bank, the insurance company and the motel that quietly housed a movement. If you came here searching for Reginald Lewis, Beatrice, John H. Johnson, Ebony and A. G. Gaston in one place, you are in the right room. Pour something warm.
These are the builders, told from the record.
A word about how we handle the numbers, because this magazine respects its readers too much to inflate them. Fortunes of this era are reported differently by different sources, and where the record gives us a range, we print the range and say whose estimate it is.
What is not in dispute — in any source we reviewed — is the shape of each story: the starting point, the mechanism, and the scale each man reached. The mechanisms are the lesson. Let us take them in order of method: the deal, the audience, and the institution.
Reginald F. Lewis: The Dealmaker
Reginald Francis Lewis was born in Baltimore in 1942 and raised there, and the outlines of his rise are the stuff of a book he began writing himself — Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?, completed after his death by Blair S. Walker with his widow, Loida Nicolas Lewis.
Harvard Law School’s account of the memoir gives the title its origin: a childhood question, asked when his grandparents were discussing employment discrimination in segregated Baltimore. The boy’s answer became a programme for a life.
The preparation came first, and it was formidable. Lewis graduated from Virginia State University and, as the profile of Lewis published by Libertarianism.org recounts, was admitted to Harvard Law School after a summer programme — described in that profile and in the anniversary coverage as the only student in the school’s long history admitted before applying.
After Harvard, he practised corporate law and, with partners, established what the same profile calls Wall Street’s first Black-owned law firm. Fifteen years of other people’s deals taught him how deals are actually made: the paper, the financing, the patience. Then he became a principal.
Through his TLC Group, he bought the McCall Pattern Company — the home sewing-pattern business — for $22.5 million, according to the Libertarianism.org profile, and steered it, in that account, to two of its most profitable years.
McCall was the rehearsal. The performance, in November 1987, was Beatrice. Lewis led a leveraged buyout of the international food, beverage and grocery operations of Beatrice Foods for $985 million.
The anniversary and reference coverage we reviewed is consistent on the facts and careful about the superlatives, and we will be careful with them too: the transaction was reported at the time as the largest offshore buyout yet completed by an American company, and the renamed TLC Beatrice International became, in the words of the anniversary coverage, the first African American–owned enterprise to break through the billion-dollar mark, grossing $1.8 billion in sales in its first year.
BET’s biographical entry on Lewis records that at its peak, in 1996 — three years after his death — TLC Beatrice had sales of $2.2 billion. Forbes listed Lewis among the 400 richest Americans in 1992, with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $400 million; that figure is Forbes’s estimate, printed here as theirs.
What Lewis himself built is simpler to state: a Black-owned, Black-managed multinational, assembled by a Black dealmaker using the full machinery of Wall Street — law, leverage and nerve — at a scale no one of his background had been allowed to attempt before.
He gave like a founder, too. The Harvard account records that shortly before his death he donated $3 million to Harvard Law School — then, in Harvard’s telling, the largest gift in its history — and the International Law Center there bears his name. He died of brain cancer in 1993, aged 50.
The lesson today’s owners still quote from Lewis is not the billion. It is the sequence: mastery of the craft first, ownership second, scale third — and no step skipped because someone else thought the room was not for you.
Our own pages on what comes after the building — Succession Without War — begin, whether they say so or not, in conversations Lewis forced the business world to have.
John H. Johnson: The Publisher
If Lewis’s instrument was the deal, John Harold Johnson’s was the audience — an audience American business insisted did not exist, until he proved, issue by issue, that it was the most loyal readership in the country.
Johnson was born in Arkansas City, Arkansas, in 1918 and came to Chicago as a teenager in the Great Migration.
The Chicago Architecture Center’s history of Johnson Publishing tells the founding story plainly: working at the Black-owned Supreme Life Insurance Company, compiling newspaper clippings for a digest, Johnson saw the gap; with a $500 loan borrowed against his mother’s furniture, he launched Negro Digest in 1942.
He founded Johnson Publishing Company the same year, launched Ebony in 1945 and Jet in 1951.
Understand what those two magazines did, because the encyclopaedia obituary of Johnson states it as record: Ebony, modelled in spirit on the great picture magazines, showed Black achievement, Black elegance and Black family life at full scale, beautifully photographed, at a time when the mainstream press largely ignored or caricatured all three.
Jet, the pocket-sized weekly, carried the news — including, most consequentially, the civil-rights coverage the white press would not lead with. The combined circulations of the two titles passed, in the encyclopaedia’s account, more than 2.5 million by 2004, and one modern biography in our sources puts Ebony’s peak monthly readership at over 11 million.
Those are different measures — circulation and readership are not the same number — and we print them attributed, as we found them. The commercial point stands either way: Johnson then did the second, harder thing. He persuaded national advertisers that this audience was worth buying, and that Black models and Black consumers belonged in national campaigns.
He did not just publish magazines. He created the market that funded them.
The empire widened, as empires built on an audience tend to: Fashion Fair Cosmetics, founded in 1973 in the encyclopaedia’s account, because his readers could not buy makeup made for their skin in the stores that carried his magazines; the Ebony Fashion Fair, the travelling show his wife Eunice directed; books; radio.
In 1972 the company’s own headquarters at 820 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago was completed — designed, the Architecture Center records, by John Warren Moutoussamy — its interiors a standing exhibition of the world Ebony had documented.
Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, and he is widely reported — in the biography in our sources — as the first Black person to appear on the Forbes 400 list. He died in Chicago in 2005, aged 87.
Johnson Publishing itself filed for bankruptcy in 2019, after selling Ebony and Jet several years earlier, as the magazine industry he had mastered changed underneath it. The titles survive under new ownership. The template he invented — dignity as a business model — survives everywhere, including, we will admit it here, in the magazine you are reading now.
You will find his heirs across our Empire Makers profiles.
A. G. Gaston: The Institution Builder
Arthur George Gaston was born on July 4, 1892, in Demopolis, Alabama, the grandson of enslaved people, raised by his grandmother. He lived to 103.
Between those two facts sits the most instructive balance sheet in this entire series — not the largest, but the most deliberately built, one institution at a time, each one answering a need his community was being refused somewhere else.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford, in its entry on Gaston, records the start: after Army service in the First World War and work in the mines, Gaston in 1923 started the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company with $500, growing out of a burial-insurance society among Black miners.
Burial insurance sounds modest until you understand it: it was the financial product his neighbours most urgently needed, sold in small weekly payments, by a man they knew, through churches they trusted.
From that base, Stanford records, he developed an empire it estimates at more than $30 million — while other accounts in our sources value the combined enterprise, by the 1990s, above $130 million. The estimates differ by era and by what they count, and we print both, attributed, rather than pretend otherwise.
The components are agreed: the Smith & Gaston Funeral Home; the Booker T. Washington Business College; Citizens Federal Savings and Loan, founded in 1957 in the syllabus account in our sources; and, in 1954, the A. G. Gaston Motel on Birmingham’s Fourth Avenue — in the King Institute’s words, the city’s only first-class accommodation that accepted Black guests.
That motel is why Gaston’s name sits in the national story and not only the business pages.
In the spring of 1963, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s history of the Gaston Motel and the King Institute both place Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference headquartered at the motel during the Birmingham campaign — King working from Room 30, in the detailed syllabus account in our sources.
Gaston did not always agree with the movement’s tactics, and the record in our sources does not hide that.
What it shows is a man who understood that his institutions existed for exactly such a moment: he provided the rooms, the meeting space and, when King and other demonstrators were jailed, bail money drawn on his own bank — the amount given in one detailed account in our sources is $160,000, printed here as that account’s figure.
In 1963 the motel was bombed; that same year, Gaston’s home was firebombed too. He rebuilt, kept building, and in 1987, in the account published by Vanderbilt’s Owen School blog, sold his insurance company to his own employees through an employee stock ownership plan — 350 employees paying, in that account, $3.5 million for a company valued at $35 million.
“I could have sold it for a lot more. But I couldn’t see throwing them out of jobs. They helped me build this thing.”— A. G. Gaston, via Money Magazine, in the linked account
There is the whole philosophy in one sentence, and it is why Gaston, of our three builders, may be the one this magazine’s readers should study longest. Lewis shows you scale. Johnson shows you audience.
Gaston shows you duration: a century-long life, institutions that outlasted segregation itself, wealth that was deliberately converted — into a college, a bank, a boys and girls club that still operates in Birmingham in the accounts we reviewed, and finally into ownership shared with the people who had built it beside him.
The Gaston Motel is today the centrepiece of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, designated in 2017 in the National Trust’s account. The motel that housed a movement is now held by the nation as a monument. Inheritance, again — this time in brick, on Fourth Avenue, with the name over the door.
What the Three Roads Teach
Set the three side by side and a curriculum assembles itself. Lewis: master a scarce, gatekept craft until your competence is undeniable, then buy scale rather than begging for a seat — and read our Family Office Question with his foundation in mind.
Johnson: an underserved audience, served with excellence and never with condescension, is not a niche; it is a market waiting for its first serious supplier — and the supplier who proves it can tax the whole industry’s attention thereafter.
Gaston: build the boring institutions — insurance, savings, burial, lodging — that a community needs every week of every year, and your balance sheet becomes civic infrastructure; power follows, whether you seek it or not.
All three also did the unglamorous thing our Inheritance series began with in Mali and Benin: they kept records, built organisations that could survive a bad year, and thought in decades. Fortunes of this kind are not events. They are habits, compounded.
That is the inheritance — not the money itself, which disperses, but the method, which does not have to.
The Kingdoms of Gold — Zimbabwe, Benin, Ashanti
Black Wall Street — What Greenwood Built
Succession Without War
The Family Office Question
Empire Makers — Black Excellence Profiles
Libertarianism.org — “Reginald Lewis, America’s First Black Billionaire”
Harvard Law School — “Breaking Barriers and Building an Empire” (the Lewis memoir)
BET — “This Day in Black History: Dec. 7, 1942” (Reginald F. Lewis)
Chicago Architecture Center — “John H. Johnson and the Johnson Publishing Company”
Encyclopedia.com — “Johnson, John H. 1918–2005”
The King Institute at Stanford — “Gaston, Arthur George”
National Trust for Historic Preservation — “A.G. Gaston Motel”
Vanderbilt Owen Blog — “The Socially Responsible ‘Black Titan’” (A. G. Gaston)
The Ledger (New Black Wall Street) — “A.G. Gaston” syllabus
Questions & Answers
Why does Black cultural history matter today?
Part V of The Inheritance, and the closest to home: Reginald Lewis and the Beatrice deal, John H. Johnson and the Ebony empire, A. It links to 6 stories and articles — open any card to read the full piece.
What should every house know about this history?
Part V of The Inheritance, and the closest to home: Reginald Lewis and the Beatrice deal, John H. Johnson and the Ebony empire, A.
How do I read the full stories on The Fortune Builders — Lewis, Johnson, and Gaston?
Choose any card on this page. Each one opens a full page of its own — the complete story or article, with its sources linked.