Black fortunes shomari wills6/11/2023 Thus it has been with the lives of Leidesdorff, Mary Ellen Pleasant, Robert Reed Church, Hannah Elias, Annie Turnbo Malone, O.W. And that progress has not always meant forward movement – reversals, segues and zigzags are all components of the African American story. Then as now people of color understood that forward progress meanders. “The tactic worked, and soon the legend began to be repeated as fact,” writes Wills, a journalist who has worked for CNN and ABC. The legend was created largely by press releases written by her manager Freeman Ransom and sent to black newspapers that implied Walker was a millionaire. “Black Fortune” goes a long way toward debunking the myth of Walker being the first black millionaire. Wills writes that Walker was the first African American brazen enough to boast of her wealth at a time when affluent people of color knew that whites, enabled by the government and the courts, could strip them of their wealth under any pretext. Walker, Wills writes, “was far from the first but was one of the first to flaunt and claim her wealth openly and fearlessly.” Not so, according to Shomari Wills, author of “Black Fortunes: The story of the first Six African Americans who escaped slavery and became millionaires" published by Amistad. Who was the first black millionaire in America? Madame C.J.
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