Anthony Overton

Anthony Overton was born on 21 March 1865 in Monroe, Louisiana, in the closing months of the Civil War, to Anthony Overton and Martha Deberry Overton. Born into slavery, he rose to become the first African American to own a major conglomerate.

By 1892 Overton was serving as a municipal judge in Topeka, Kansas. In 1898, he and his family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where with family savings of $2,000 he founded the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company, which made baking powder, cosmetics and household products sold in drug stores and groceries.

In 1911 he moved the company to Chicago to reach a larger market. There it grew into the foundation of a wider business empire that included the Half-Century Magazine, the Douglass National Bank, the Victory Life Insurance Company and the Great Northern Realty Company.

In 1925 Overton founded the Chicago Bee, a Black newspaper known for supporting liberal causes, and housed it in the three-storey Chicago Bee Building along with his magazine, apartments and eventually Overton Hygienic. He was also active in the Chicago Urban League, the YMCA and the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

Overton died in Chicago on 2 July 1946, aged 81, and his sons briefly continued the Bee. When Overton Hygienic went out of business in the early 1980s, the city of Chicago took over the Chicago Bee Building and turned it into a public library, preserving a landmark of Black enterprise on the city's South Side.