Alonzo Herndon

Alonzo Franklin Herndon was born on 26 June 1858 in Walton County, Georgia, into slavery. His mother, Sophenie, was enslaved, and his father was Frank Herndon, a member of a wealthy slaveholding family and almost certainly her enslaver, who never acknowledged him. After emancipation Alonzo worked as a sharecropper and labourer before moving to Atlanta in the late 19th century.

In Atlanta, Herndon learned the barber's trade and built it into a business. He opened several shops, including the upscale Crystal Palace in 1902, which served prominent white men, and the income from his barbering and from shrewd real estate investments made him the city's first Black millionaire.

In 1905 Herndon bought a small, struggling mutual aid association and turned it into the Atlanta Mutual Insurance Association, which he renamed the Atlanta Life Insurance Company in 1922. It became one of five African-American insurance companies of its time to achieve legal reserve status, and one of the most successful Black-owned businesses in the country.

He grew the company by rescuing other failing Black insurers and merging them into Atlanta Life, arguing that the strategy built confidence in Black business and protected jobs for African-American men and women. He was also an original member of the Niagara Movement, a forerunner of the NAACP, and a supporter of local organisations advancing Black business and community life.

In 1910 Alonzo and his second wife, Jessie Gillespie Herndon, built the Herndon Home, a Beaux Arts mansion that is today a historic site in Atlanta. Herndon died on 21 July 1927 as the city's wealthiest Black citizen, and his son Norris grew Atlanta Life from about $1 million in assets at his death to $84 million by 1973.