A.G. Gaston

Arthur George Gaston (July 4, 1892 – January 19, 1996) was an American businessman who established a number of businesses in Birmingham, Alabama, and who played a significant role in the struggle to integrate Birmingham in 1963. In his lifetime, Gaston's companies were some of the most prominent African-American businesses in the American South.

The grandson of an enslaved person, A. G. Gaston was born July 4, 1892, in Demopolis, Alabama, to Tom and Rosa McDonald Gaston. Gaston's father died while he was still an infant. He grew up in a log cabin with his mother and grandparents, Joe and Idella Gaston. He moved to Birmingham in 1905 with the Loveman family, who employed his mother as a cook.

Gaston’s formal education ended with the 10th grade. After earning his certificate from the Tuggle Institute (which only went through the 10th grade), he served in the army in France during World War I and then went to work in the mines run by Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company in Fairfield, Alabama.

While working in the mines, he hit on the plan of selling lunches to his fellow miners and then branched into loaning money to them at twenty-five percent interest. It was also while working in the mines that he conceived of the idea of offering burial insurance to co-workers. He had noticed that mine widows would come to the mines and to local churches to collect donations in order to bury their husbands and he wondered if people would "give a few dimes into a burial society to bury their dead". As a result, Gaston formed the Booker T. Washington Burial Society, which later became the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company.

Driven out of Fairfield because of his father-in-law's political differences with the mayor, Gaston and his family moved to Birmingham. Gaston bought and renovated a property on the edge of Kelly Ingram Park in downtown Birmingham, where, in partnership with his father-in-law, he started the Smith & Gaston Funeral Home, in 1938. Smith & Gaston sponsored gospel music programs on local radio stations and launched a quartet of its own.

Realizing that there were not enough blacks with sufficient training to be able to work in the insurance and funeral industries, In 1939 he and his second-wife established the Booker T. Washington business school. Other Gaston enterprises included Citizens Federal Savings and Loan Association, the first black-owned financial institution in Birmingham in more than forty years. On July 1, 1954 Gaston opened the A.G. Gaston Motel on a site adjoining Kelly Ingram park.

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