Part IThe Story
The Powder Nobody Suspects
The box is a little over two and a half inches on a side and half an inch deep. It is made of cardboard and paper and holds 0.42 ounces. A woman's upper body is printed on the lid, with a small pink flower at her chest. The shade is printed on the back: Olive-Tone. The box now belongs to the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, where it was shown in an exhibition called Redefining Nude. The museum's catalog lists the object's materials in the dry order of conservators: cardboard, paper, powder.
Powder. The catalog suggests it is still in there, never used.
The company that made it, the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company of South State Street, Chicago, sold High Brown Face Powder in shades it called nut-brown, olive-tone, brunette, and flesh-pink. These were among the first cosmetics in the American market made for the skin of Black women, and High Brown has been described as "the first market success in the sale of cosmetics for black women." In 1921 the company's advertising made a promise that seems written to be read a century later by someone who knows how the story ends:
— Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Co. advertisement, 1921High-Brown Face Powder clings so closely and matches the skin so perfectly that no one ever suspects the powder is there.
The product was meant to be invisible once worn: it should match the skin so closely that no one could tell it was there. The man whose surname was on the box had a talent for something similar. Anthony Overton built what Harvard Business School's database of twentieth-century American business leaders calls the first major business conglomerate headed by an African American. It included a cosmetics manufacturer, a women's magazine, a newspaper, a realty company, a life insurance company licensed in New York, and a nationally chartered bank. In 1927 he became the first businessman to win the NAACP's Spingarn Medal. For a few years at the end of the 1920s he was widely considered the most successful Black businessman in the United States, and some circles called him "the merchant prince of his race."
He did not own a car. He walked to work. After his wife died he lived in the spare bedrooms of his married children. His business records and personal papers have not survived. Much of what was printed about his early life in encyclopedias, obituaries, and newspaper profiles turns out to be false, and his biographer believes that Overton made up a good deal of it himself. He ran the Half-Century Magazine while presenting a woman on his staff as its owner and editor, and he wrote some of its articles under the name McAdoo Baker. Once his empire was built, he seems to have worked to make his own role in it hard to see.
On the evening of November 30, 2018, about twenty people in coats and scarves gathered on the first floor of the building Overton commissioned in 1922 at 3619–3627 South State Street. The walls had been stripped to bare plaster and exposed brick. A pop-up exhibition called Art and Social Justice: Examining the State of Our Environment was ending, and on the wall facing the entrance a projector played D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation on a continuous loop. The film was released in 1915, four years after Overton moved his company to Chicago and four years before the city's race riot killed at least 38 people and left thousands, mostly on the South Side, without homes. In the room where Overton's company had made powder meant to be undetectable on Black skin, the most influential racist image in American film history was playing on the plaster at a size no one could miss.
The curators did not choose the building at random. Neither, a hundred years earlier, had Overton.
By the Numbers
The Overton Empire
62Products manufactured by Overton Hygienic by 1915
400Door-to-door salespeople on the payroll by the 1911 move to Chicago
$1M+Valuation of Overton Hygienic in 1927
8States with Victory Life Insurance branches by 1925
~300,000Black Chicagoans by 1930, up from roughly 50,000 in 1910
~98%Share of his early-1920s fortune gone within two decades
85Years Overton Hygienic operated, 1898–1983
A Coroner's Son in Ouachita Parish
Even his birthday is uncertain. One encyclopedia entry gives March 21, 1865, and in the same article gives March 18, 1864. A scholarly review of his biography says he was born into bondage in Monroe, Louisiana, "in late 1864 or during the first few months of 1865." A Black history website notes that slavery did not end in the United States as a matter of law until December 18, 1865, which means that under either date Overton was born enslaved, in the last months before slavery ended. He started life as property in a legal sense and ended it as the first African American to run a conglomerate.
His father's story comes first. Anthony Overton Sr., called Antoine in Monroe's own records and local memory, was born enslaved, was freed, and then moved quickly. In 1866, according to a Monroe newspaper's account drawn from the family's research, he bought the property that housed the first school for Black children taught in Monroe, the Wisner School, on the site of what is now Excellence Academy on Washington Street. In 1869 he became the first African American elected to public office in Ouachita Parish, as coroner. From 1871 he sat in the Louisiana House of Representatives. He was president and treasurer of the parish's first Republican club. He owned a store downtown on a parcel locals called "The Triangle."
A freedman founding a school, then holding the office that investigates deaths, then serving in the legislature, then running a store: in the space of a few years he did most of the things Reconstruction made possible for a Black man in the Deep South. That was also the problem. In the 1870s, as white Southerners who opposed Reconstruction took back power, his position as a businessman and former legislator drew threats. The family fled north to Topeka, Kansas, where a community of Black refugees had formed. Anthony Overton Sr.'s obituary ran in the Western Recorder of Lawrence, Kansas, on April 18, 1884. He had brought his family out of Louisiana but did not live long in Kansas.
Robert E. Weems Jr., the business historian who wrote the only book-length biography of the son, names two mentors in Overton's early life: his father and Booker T. Washington. Taken together they were an unusual pair of teachers. The father had tried the political route that Reconstruction opened, and it had nearly gotten him killed. Washington argued in public that Black progress would come through building businesses, owning property, and becoming economically indispensable, not through politics. The son would become, in Weems's words, "a conservative disciple of Booker T. Washington." Biographers usually treat that kind of conservatism as a position someone reasons their way into. The Overtons came to it after fleeing for their lives.
In 2016 the Northeast Louisiana Delta African American Heritage Museum held a two-day celebration of the father and son, organized partly by a family association called the Overton Nation. A museum representative said something that shows how much the father's world had been lost even in Monroe: "We really don't know the history of these people."
Fifteen Years the Biographies Got Wrong
Here is the life as it was usually told, in an obituary or a Black History Month profile, for most of the twentieth century. A brilliant young man in Topeka earns a chemistry degree at Washburn College. He takes a law degree from the University of Kansas in 1888, practices law, and becomes a judge in Shawnee, Kansas, all before he turns thirty. Then he leaves all those accomplishments behind for commerce, which in this version is just one more thing he was good at. A 1988 profile in the Chicago Metro News was titled "From Peddler to Banker," which at least placed the rise later. Most versions put it early, so that he seemed to have started out already accomplished.
Weems checked the record and found something less flattering and more useful. "Within the matter of a few years," he writes, Overton "had failed to earn a law degree, failed to start a successful business, and failed to be elected to political office." Overton did graduate from Washburn. He then attended the University of Kansas for two years and dropped out. He moved from Kansas to Oklahoma and back to Kansas, trying different things. In a conversation with a Kansas paper about the book, Weems put it directly: Overton struggled until he was in his thirties.
— Robert E. Weems Jr., The Merchant Prince of Black ChicagoWithin the matter of a few years, he had failed to earn a law degree, failed to start a successful business, and failed to be elected to political office.
Weems is the Willard W. Garvey Distinguished Professor of Business History at Wichita State University, born in 1951. His earlier books include Business in Black and White and Building the Black Metropolis. He says he took on a biography because years earlier, as a junior professor, he heard John Hope Franklin describe a complete historian's career as a monograph, an edited volume, and a biography. Weems had done the first two and needed a subject for the third. He chose a man who had been praised for a century without anyone writing a book about him, and he found that much of the praise rested on accomplishments Overton had invented. The result, The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2020, was reviewed by the Journal of African American History as "appropriately critical of Overton throughout."
What makes the invention interesting is who Overton was otherwise. Weems describes him as "low-key and unassuming," and says plainly that he "was not a braggart." He did not wear expensive suits or drive a fine car. Yet after arriving in Chicago, at the point where he had the most to gain from a reputation, he periodically added a law degree and a judgeship to his own history. Weems found the pattern contradictory. One way to read it is that a modest man used the inflated résumé the way his company used the powder: to cover the uneven years of his twenties, to make it look as though he had always been successful, smoothly enough that no one would think to check.
The real record in the Kansas papers is sparse. In December 1899 the Plaindealer of Topeka reported on Black business in Kansas City and mentioned a grocery Overton had opened in Kansas City, Kansas. In June 1900 the same paper ran an item headlined "Hopeful Signs." By then, Weems notes, Overton had four children. "He had the motivation to be successful at something," Weems said, "so he could feed his family."
The usual story attributes his rise to brilliance. The record suggests he succeeded because he had a family to feed and had already failed at law and politics.
From the Baking Aisle to the Vanity
The Hygienic Manufacturing Company was founded in 1898 in Kansas City, Missouri, moved across the state line to Kansas City, Kansas, and in 1911 moved to Chicago. At first it sold ordinary goods. Baking powder, extracts, and toiletries went to drug stores and groceries, the same channels his father's store had used, sold to customers who had to buy them every week whether or not anyone cared about the brand.
The same year, 1898, a white mob in Wilmington, North Carolina, overthrew a city government that included Black officeholders, which is now remembered as the only successful coup d'état in American history. The period that had made Antoine Overton a coroner and a legislator was ending violently. His son was starting a business making a white baking powder for grocery shelves.
Then Overton noticed what the shelves were missing. Women of color had almost no cosmetics made in their skin tones. The powders on sale assumed a white customer, and a Black woman who wanted face powder had to make do with a shade that didn't fit or go without. Overton had studied chemistry at Washburn, and he moved into cosmetics. By the time he reached Chicago in 1911, the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company made more than fifty products, including hair creams and eye makeup, sold by a salaried sales force and about 400 door-to-door salespeople. By 1915 it made sixty-two. He sold perfumes under the same High Brown name.
The name deserves a moment. "High brown" was a term used within Black communities, often with a shade-conscious undertone, and Overton made it into a brand. The face on the box is ambiguous in the same way as the name. The product sold self-respect and also sold matching, which carried its own expectations. The shades acknowledged a range of complexions, and they also promised the wearer an even, smooth appearance. One historian of the company warns that celebrating Overton "can sometimes run the risk of metaphorically 'powdering over' the glaring racial disharmony that always undermined his more idealistic vision." The same writer also notes the hesitation many people feel about honoring a man who made his money "selling 'cheap cosmetics,'" and concludes that, considering the thousands of women "who never had access to these types of products before," the legacy is "every bit as significant" as the bank or the newspaper.
Overton's competition was not the white cosmetics houses, which ignored his customers. It was two Black women. Madam C. J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove, and Annie Malone had built large businesses in hair and beauty products. Both used their own testimony in their marketing: I used this, it worked for me, and it can work for you. A man could not credibly sell face powder to Black women that way.
So he found other faces. He used his daughters in his advertisements. At a time when Black personal care products were not stocked or demonstrated in the major department stores, he set up a dedicated office where his daughters and attractive female employees demonstrated the line to customers. He had been unable to make a career in law, so he built his own selling space. He could not appear as the face of his products, so he relied on his family.
That arrangement, a man with his name on the factory and women representing it to the public, would shape the most deceptive and most effective thing he ever did.
The Editor Who Wasn't, and the Man Called McAdoo Baker
In 1916 Overton started a magazine.
The Half-Century Magazine was aimed at Black women. Its name looked back fifty years to emancipation, the same span as Overton's own life. Its purpose, which Overton did not advertise, was to sell Overton Hygienic products. Weems calls it plainly "a venue to more effectively market Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company products," and a magazine that was transparently a cosmetics catalog would have drawn exactly the charge of self-promotion Overton wanted to avoid.
He handled this with an arrangement that seems strange today and was apparently effective then. He named a female employee as the magazine's owner, editor, and public face. He wrote anonymous editorials himself, and he published articles under the pen name McAdoo Baker, setting out his views on business, racial identity, and personal conduct. Weems calls it "skullduggery," and the word is fair. Readers of the Half-Century believed they were reading a woman's magazine edited by a woman. Much of its outlook came from a middle-aged manufacturer in Chicago writing under another man's name.
It is equally fair to say that the magazine treated its readers better than most of the publications they could buy. The Half-Century did not run personal care product ads that insulted its readers' race. In the Black press of the time, much of the advertising for hair and skin products depended on persuading Black women that their natural features needed correcting, and those ads paid many publishers' bills. Overton's magazine turned that revenue down. It also sponsored a contest celebrating the beauty of African American women. Weems concludes that this advertising policy, together with the contest, "enhanced Overton-Hygienic's position in the marketplace."
The magazine was dishonest about who ran it and respectful toward the women who read it, and the respect is the reason the deception worked as marketing. Overton had found what later marketers would call a clean ad environment: a publication in which his products were the only respectful option on the page because he had removed the insulting ones. Owning the publication meant he could shape both the editorial content and the ads around it.
Some of the editorials have survived. In 1922 the magazine ran this, unsigned:
— Editorial, The Half-Century Magazine, 1922Money is a wonderful thing. If you have enough of it, the world voluntarily places a coat of white wash over your blackest crimes. Money opened the doors for some of the most exclusive places to the Jews. Enough money would blind the eyes of the white race to our own color.
The surviving record does not show whether Overton wrote that paragraph. We know he wrote anonymous editorials for the magazine, but we can't tie this one to him. The image of a coat of whitewash covering someone's color fits a company that sold matching powder uncomfortably well. The editorial's argument is close to Washington's: wealth as a way to be accepted, money as something that makes white society stop seeing race. Its tone is harsher than Washington's. It does not say money will earn respect. It says money will make people look away. That year, according to the South Side Weekly, Overton's fortune stood at between $300,000 and $500,000.
He closed the Half-Century in 1925. By then it had done its job. The magazine had built Overton Hygienic's reputation, and the man behind it was ready to stop writing under a pseudonym and put his real name on buildings.
A Pocket of Utopia Inside a Powder Keg
In 1900, Chicago had about 30,000 Black residents in a city of a million. In 1910 it had about 50,000. By 1930 the number was close to 300,000. The Great Migration brought Black Southerners north by the hundreds of thousands, and in Chicago they were confined to a narrow strip of the South Side that people called the Black Belt and that later took the name Bronzeville. Unions largely excluded them. Most trades would not train them. Most white-collar jobs were closed to them. They could not live outside the boundaries of the Belt.
That exclusion was oppressive, and it also created a captive market. Black businesses could grow by serving Black customers that white businesses ignored or mistreated. The Black press later called the area the Black Metropolis, a city within the city. One historian of Overton's company calls it "a pocket of utopia inside a powder keg." The violence was real. In the summer of 1919 the city's race riot killed at least 38 people. Black businessmen who moved beyond the Belt's boundaries were punished for it.
Jesse Binga is the clearest example. Like Overton, he was born around 1865, and he became Chicago's first Black banker, with a bank in the Black Belt. In 1917 he moved his family into a white neighborhood. His house was bombed several times, and his offices were attacked twice. His story became one of the flashpoints that led into the 1919 riot. Binga and Overton worked together, competed with each other, attended the same lavish Christmas parties, and in the end both fell. Binga showed in public what it cost a Black millionaire to live as a millionaire. Overton, as far as the sources show, never moved out. In his later years he lived in his children's spare rooms.
Robert S. Abbott was the third major figure of that small world. He founded the Chicago Defender in 1905 with twenty-five cents and became one of Chicago's first Black millionaires by publishing a newspaper that urged Southern Black readers to move north. Abbott brought customers north through his paper, and Overton sold them powder once they arrived. The two men were bound to compete eventually.
In 1922 Overton hired the architect Z. Erol Smith to design a building on South State Street. It opened around 1923: brick and terra cotta, four stories, combining a store, offices, and a factory. Manufacturing took place inside, and it also housed Overton's other businesses, the Douglass National Bank, the Victory Life Insurance Company, and the Great Northern Realty Company. A 1985 National Register nomination later called it one of the most important buildings in the district. It was the visible center of a neighborhood whose residents had few other places where Black ownership was this large and this public.
The second-floor tenants are worth noting. Walter T. Bailey, the first licensed African American architect in Illinois, opened his first Chicago office there. Bailey had his profession's credential in a state where hardly any Black person held one, and he set up practice inside the building of a man who had failed to complete his own professional training and later claimed he hadn't. Bailey had a license. Overton had the building. Each had what the other's story had lacked.
— Paula Robinson, president, Bronzeville Community Development PartnershipOf all the black business pioneers, Overton is my historical business mentor. [Overton's] civic entrepreneurial vision set the bar. State Street was our 'Black Wall Street.'
According to the curator of a Chicago manufacturing museum, the companies run from that building employed hundreds of Black men and women "in jobs that were often wholly unavailable to them elsewhere in the city." Those are the paychecks the historical markers describe. Overton was proving, the same writer says, "as shrewd and driven as any of his white counterparts in the downtown skyscrapers; most of whom would never welcome him into their billiard rooms, let alone boardrooms."
The Merchant Prince Buys a Charter
In 1922, the year he commissioned the building, Overton became president of the Douglass National Bank. It was the second Black-owned bank in the United States to receive a national charter. The Comptroller of the Currency gave it charter number 12227, and like other national banks of the period it issued its own currency. A surviving Douglass National five-dollar note, printed on the 1902 design with the officers' signatures in ink, is preserved in an Illinois history archive. The bank issued $5, $10, and $20 notes in the 1929 series as well. For several years, money circulating on the South Side carried the name of a bank housed in the building on State Street.
That mattered because the history of Black banking up to then had mostly been a history of loss. The Freedman's Bank, founded in 1865, the year Overton was born, was supposed to help newly freed people build savings. It failed because of speculation and fraud by its white managers, and its depositors lost their money and their trust in banks. Between 1888 and 1934, according to the Library of Congress, 134 Black-owned banks opened, and nine survived the Depression. A Black-owned bank with a federal charter was a bold claim. It amounted to arguing that the federal government's approval could protect a Black institution better than the Freedman's Bank had protected its depositors.
Two years later Overton started the Victory Life Insurance Company. Insurance offered the same kind of opportunity as banking. White insurers had used an 1896 study, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, which applied statistics and eugenic theory to argue that Black Americans were inherently more prone to disease, to justify refusing Black customers or charging them prohibitive premiums. Discrimination left a large group of people uninsured. Victory Life had branches in eight states by 1925. In 1927 it became the only Black-owned insurance company allowed to do business in New York State, a regulatory approval that no other Black firm had obtained and that the NAACP's medal citation specifically noted.
After the New York approval, Weems writes, Overton "in some circles, became regarded as 'the merchant prince of his race.'" The title was earned. It also brought the risk that comes with being called a prince, since people expect a prince to look the part.
In 1925, by most accounts, Overton started the Chicago Bee, a Black newspaper known for its liberal positions. It set up a direct rivalry with Abbott's Defender. One of the Bee's managing editors was a woman, Olive M. Diggs, which was rare in the newspaper business of the 1920s, Black or white. Diggs held the job openly, under her own name, which the Half-Century's nominal editor never did. Weems notes that although Overton was a Washington conservative, he held views about women's "proper" role that were fairly progressive for his time. The record shows both the deception at the magazine and Diggs's real authority at the Bee.
The awards came in 1927. The NAACP gave him the Spingarn Medal, awarded each year since 1915 for outstanding achievement by an African American. The previous recipients were scientists, soldiers, composers, poets, and scholars: W. E. B. Du Bois in 1920, George Washington Carver in 1923, Carter G. Woodson in 1926. Charles W. Chesnutt followed in 1928. Overton was the first businessman on the list, and it would be decades before the medal went to John H. Johnson in 1966. That same year Overton won the first gold medal in business awarded by the Harmon Foundation.
Two years later, in 1929, he hired Z. Erol Smith again, this time to design a home for the Bee. The Chicago Bee Building has a façade covered entirely in terra cotta and was the only Art Deco building in Bronzeville. Construction started just as the Depression began, and the building was ready in 1931. By then it was clear what had gone wrong. At the moment he became widely famous, Overton had built his empire on an arrangement between the bank and the insurance company that he had kept hidden.
What the Depression Found in the Ledgers
In late 1929, Weems writes, Overton was "perceived to be the nation's most successful black businessman." By the middle of the 1930s that view had changed sharply.
The problem began with real estate, as it often does. The Depression hit property values in Black Chicago especially hard, and both the Douglass National Bank and Victory Life held assets tied to those values. As the properties lost value, the bank's loans and the insurer's investments lost value with them. That would have been a serious blow even to a well-run, separately capitalized company.
Overton's companies were not run separately. The bank and the insurance company shared a building and a president, and as Weems documents, they also shared money in a way the insurer's policyholders had not approved. Over a long period, Overton had been moving Victory Life funds into Douglass National without authorization. The premiums of insurance customers across eight states, paid on the promise that Victory Life would hold reserves for their families, had been propping up the bank. When this came out, he was removed as president of Victory Life.
The bank failed anyway. Weems writes that despite "creative efforts to keep it afloat," Douglass National became a casualty of the Depression. It closed in 1932, the same period in which Binga's bank also collapsed. That left Black Chicago with two failed Black banks run by the two most prominent Black businessmen in the city, both men born in the last year of slavery.
It is worth stating the failure precisely. Overton was not a con man who built a fake empire. The cosmetics company was real, sold real products, and employed hundreds of people. The bank was real, federally chartered, and printed real currency. The New York insurance approval was real. The deception lay in how the parts were connected. Money moved quietly from the business with an obligation to keep reserves to the business that needed propping up. The same instinct appears throughout his career. He let a woman stand in for him at the magazine, wrote under McAdoo Baker's name, claimed a judgeship he never held, and moved Victory Life funds into the bank. In each case he kept the uneven or unflattering parts out of sight, believing nobody would look closely. When the Depression forced people to look, the scheme was exposed.
The South Side Weekly reported that almost 98 percent of the fortune Overton controlled in 1922 was gone within two decades. He kept two businesses: the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company and the Chicago Bee. After the bank closed in 1932, Overton Hygienic's offices moved into the new Bee Building, the Art Deco building that had been planned when he was at his peak. He lost the title "the Merchant Prince of his Race."
He kept the company he had built, the one that sold powder. It was the part of the empire rooted in ordinary daily purchases, and the part that took no deposits and held no one else's money.
No Automobile, a Borrowed Room
His biographer compares him to Warren Buffett, which sounds odd until you see what he means. "Overton enjoyed the investing, the deal making," Weems told a Kansas newspaper, "but he was low key, non-materialistic. He didn't own an automobile, and the widowed Overton usually lived in his grown children's spare bedroom."
That last detail tells you a lot about him. Overton's wife was Clara Gregg Overton. A University of Chicago Library exhibition devoted to the family pairs her name with his in a section of its own. After she died, the man who had built two of the most important commercial buildings in Black Chicago did not buy a mansion. He did not move to a white neighborhood and wait for the threats. He moved in with his married children. In the 1920s, when his name was on the bank's currency, he walked to work.
The contrast with Binga is clear. Binga wanted the visible signs of wealth, including a house where Black families were not allowed, and was attacked repeatedly for it. Overton, who seems to have valued not being noticed more than the comforts money could buy, took almost none of those signs. He wanted the deals and the companies to grow, and he left the trappings to others. If the 1922 editorial was his, he wrote that enough money would make white society stop seeing his color. He seems to have chosen something nearly opposite: to keep most of his wealth out of view.
The University of Chicago exhibition is titled Degrees of Distinction. It focuses on Eva Overton Lewis and Julian Herman Lewis, M.D., Ph.D., and their academic achievements at the University of Chicago and afterward, and it includes a section on Overton's businesses. The exhibition celebrating his descendants is named for the academic degrees he himself never finished and later claimed.
The 1940s brought him a partial recovery. Weems describes "a rehabilitation of Anthony Overton's public image" and a business revival, so that when Overton died on July 2, 1946, aged about eighty-one, most of the hostility from the early 1930s had faded. The Chicago Bee ran his obituary on July 14 under the headline "Anthony Overton: Man of Ideas," written by Lester E. Brown. Two days earlier, the Plaindealer of Kansas City, Kansas, one of the Kansas papers that had followed him when he was a struggling grocer, ran its own report, "Hold Funeral Rights for Anthony Overton." The Journal of Negro History published an obituary in July 1947. One account says he spent his last years in financial comfort. He had been a member of Alpha Phi Alpha. His sons kept the Bee going briefly as a tabloid. It closed in 1947.
The cosmetics company kept going. His son Everett ran Overton Hygienic from 1946 until Everett died in 1960. Everett's son, Anthony Overton III, ran it from 1960 to 1983. The company that started in Kansas City in 1898 with baking powder lasted eighty-five years across three generations of the family. It outlasted the bank, the insurer, the magazine, and the newspaper, and it closed during the Reagan administration, a century after its founder had been a dropout in Lawrence, Kansas.
Three Hundred Seventy-Five Stalls
Buildings outlast the people who build them, and they are often used for things their builders never planned.
After Overton Hygienic left State Street, the building on the 3600 block was renamed the Palace Hotel and for years operated as a flophouse. The second, third, and fourth floors were divided into stalls measuring eight feet by five and a half feet, 125 to a floor and 375 in total, with shared bathrooms and showers. Floors where women had once mixed and packed High Brown powder were divided into hundreds of tiny sleeping spaces.
Then the building gained recognition. In the years after Overton Hygienic closed, Weems writes, a group of Chicagoans began campaigning to honor Overton's legacy. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 30, 1986, as part of the Black Metropolis thematic nomination, and became a Chicago Landmark on September 9, 1998. The Chicago Bee Building was restored and now holds a branch of the Chicago Public Library. A librarian there named Jo Willis has been photographed in front of its Art Deco doors. The Overton Building's current owner, the Mid-South Planning and Development Commission, plans to make it an incubator for small Black-owned businesses, which would mean helping new firms the way Overton's building once housed many.
There was also a school. Anthony Overton Elementary School on the South Side was among the schools a 1978 Chicago Metro News column described under the headline "Do You Know the Schools Named for Relevant Blacks?," a headline that suggests readers often didn't. In the summer of 2007 an artist named Alpha Bruton, chief curator of the Phantom Gallery Chicago, worked with students there on a mural about Bronzeville's history. The students took the images from books the school library was throwing out. In 2013 the city voted to close fifty public schools, more than any other American school system had closed at once, and Overton Elementary was one of them. In 2015 the Washington Park Development Group bought the empty building. Its co-founder, Ghian Foreman, also leads the Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative, and he plans to reopen it as the Overton Business and Technology Incubator.
On September 22, 2018, two months before The Birth of a Nation played on the walls of the State Street building, the old school held a public celebration. A DJ played. Archival films ran in the empty classrooms: the Bud Billiken Parade, the 1963 Chicago Public Schools boycott, and the NAACP's 1963 memorial march for Medgar Evers, who was awarded the Spingarn Medal posthumously that year, thirty-six years after the first businessman received it. "The community needs the ability to remember how to dream," Foreman said. "What can we do for ourselves, rather than waiting for someone else to parachute in?"
The question would have been familiar to Overton, who had seen his father's political career destroyed and then put his own effort into the self-help business program that Washington preached. It is still being asked in a school named for him. The man himself has only recently been rediscovered: his papers are lost, and his stories about himself are unreliable. The most dependable things left of him are his buildings and his products.
One of the products is in Philadelphia, in a box a little over two and a half inches wide, its lid printed with a woman and a pink flower, the shade on the back reading Olive-Tone. The catalog lists its materials as cardboard, paper, and powder. The box was never opened, so the powder sold on the promise that no one would know it was there is still inside, now kept on purpose under a museum's care.
Part IIThe Playbook
Overton's career is not a simple example to copy. It includes real innovation and real misconduct, a federally chartered bank and the policyholder money moved into it without authorization. The principles below come from both. Some are things he did that remain useful. Others are lessons from what went wrong. The evidence for all of them is in Part I, and for most of them the fullest documentation is in Weems's The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago.
The principles
- 1.Serve the customer the incumbents insult.
- 2.Start in the boring aisle; graduate to the vanity.
- 3.Own the page your product is sold on.
- 4.When you cannot be the face, cast one — and know what the casting costs.
- 5.Move toward the customers who haven't arrived yet.
- 6.Make the building do the arguing.
- 7.Treat exclusion as a charter.
- 8.Never let one company quietly become another's lender.
- 9.Keep the asset you could explain to a stranger.
- 10.Fund the enterprise, not the persona.
- 11.Write the record before someone writes the myth.
Principle 1
Serve the customer the incumbents insult
High Brown came from a simple observation: women of color could not buy face powder in their own skin tones. That gap existed because the established cosmetics companies did not consider Black women worth serving, and their indifference left the market open. Overton didn't need to outperform the big cosmetics houses on quality. He only needed to make shades that matched his customers, and his first four (nut-brown, olive-tone, brunette, flesh-pink) did that.
The same idea later shaped Victory Life. White insurers had used a statistical study to justify refusing or overcharging Black customers, so there was a large market of people nobody would insure. In both cases Overton's opportunity came from other companies' contempt for his customers. Markets that established firms ignore out of prejudice tend to be underpriced, because the firms assume the customers aren't worth having.
The lesson is more specific than finding an underserved market. Look for customers whom established companies actively demean, not just overlook. Those customers know they are being demeaned, and they will be loyal to a company that treats them with respect.
Tactic: List the customers your industry's largest firms treat as an afterthought or worse, and build your first product so that they would recognize it as made for them.
Principle 2
Start in the boring aisle; graduate to the vanity
The Hygienic Manufacturing Company did not start with cosmetics. It started with baking powder, extracts, and toiletries sold to drug stores and grocers, the same distribution his father's store had used. That modest product line built a supplier relationship with retailers before Overton had a product anyone would remember. When he moved into face powder, the retail outlets were already established.
Basic goods also pay steadily. They don't depend on fashion or marketing, and their sales are predictable. A founder with four children and a string of failures behind him needed that predictability before he could afford to take a risk. Years later, the company that survived the collapse of the empire was the one rooted in everyday consumer purchases, not the bank or the insurer.
Tactic: Find the dull, recurring product that gets you onto the shelf where your more ambitious product will eventually sell, and build the distribution before you need it.
Principle 3
Own the page your product is sold on
Overton saw early that advertising works partly through the content around it. The Half-Century Magazine was a sales channel for his cosmetics presented as a women's magazine, and its most effective feature was what it left out: the ads that insulted its readers' race. By refusing those ads he made his own products the only respectful choice in the magazine and connected his brand with how his readers wanted to see themselves.
The beauty contest did the same job. It celebrated African American women's beauty in the same magazine that sold them powder, without having to push the product directly.
H
The Half-Century Model
How Overton's magazine differed from conventional advertising.
| Conventional approach | Overton's approach |
|---|---|
| Buy ad space in someone else's publication. | Own the publication. |
| Accept whatever ads appear beside yours. | Exclude ads that insult the reader. |
| Advertise product features. | Sponsor a beauty contest affirming the customer. |
| Founder fronts the brand. | Female editor fronts the magazine; founder writes under pseudonym. |
| Keep the channel forever. | Phase it out (1925) once the brand is built. |
Today a company that owns its media can pursue the same strategy without concealing ownership. Overton's main innovation was controlling the context in which customers encountered his product. The hidden ownership was incidental and not worth copying.
Tactic: Build a channel you control, whether a publication, a community, or a newsletter, and protect it by excluding content that your customers find demeaning.
Principle 4
When you cannot be the face, cast one — and know what the casting costs
Walker and Malone could say they used their products. Overton couldn't. He solved this by putting his daughters in his ads, staffing a demonstration office with women, and making a female employee the public face of his magazine. Each choice addressed the same problem: a man selling beauty products to Black women needed someone those women would trust.
The first two solutions were honest. His daughters did appear in the ads, and the demonstrators did demonstrate the products. The third, with a nominal editor as cover for a founder writing under a false name, crossed a line. It worked for years, and it also set a pattern. A founder who gets used to having someone else front for him becomes comfortable with concealment, and that habit eventually showed up in his finances.
The useful lesson is about credibility. Customers trust people they can identify with, and a founder who doesn't fit the customer should hire and promote people who do. The cautionary lesson is that putting someone forward as the face is different from hiding behind them. The first is good marketing. The second sets up a later exposure.
Tactic: If you don't resemble your customer, put people who do in visible, accountable roles under their own names, and don't present them as running something they don't run.
Principle 5
Move toward the customers who haven't arrived yet
Overton moved to Chicago in 1911, when the city had about 50,000 Black residents. By 1930 it had close to 300,000. He arrived before most of the Great Migration, set up his factory, and was established when the largest numbers of new customers came. The company that had moved across state lines with a door-to-door sales force was ready.
The timing was not just luck. The Defender was already urging Southern Black readers to come north. The trends were visible to anyone who read the Black press. Overton acted on what was coming instead of what was already present, and he moved his whole company to meet it.
Tactic: Find the population movement or demographic change your market is about to experience, and move your operations there before it arrives.
Principle 6
Make the building do the arguing
The Overton Building and the Chicago Bee Building showed the public what Black ownership could look like. They were made of brick and terra cotta, built to a professional architect's design, and housed a factory, a bank, an insurer, and a realty company. The Bee Building was Bronzeville's only Art Deco structure. Walter T. Bailey, the first licensed Black architect in Illinois, opened his first Chicago office on the second floor. For depositors deciding whether to trust a Black bank, the building made the case before anyone said a word.
The buildings still stand, landmarked and restored, and are being reused as library and business incubator. Overton's papers are gone, but the buildings were never lost. A permanent physical presence outlasted everything else he left behind, including the businesses inside.
The caution is that he commissioned the Bee Building in 1929, just before the Depression. Buildings make a strong argument for permanence, and they cost a lot when the business inside them is weakening.
Tactic: Put money into a visible physical presence that demonstrates your permanence to customers you are asking to trust you, and pay for it from earnings, not from optimism about the future.
Principle 7
Treat exclusion as a charter
Overton's empire grew in the sectors where Black Americans had been most completely shut out: banking, after the Freedman's Bank failure, and insurance, after the 1896 study gave white insurers a pseudo-scientific reason to reject Black customers. Where established firms refuse to serve a group, that group becomes a market with no competition. Victory Life's 1927 license to operate in New York, which no other Black-owned insurer had, made the strategy official and gave Overton a protected position that could not be quickly copied.
O
Building the Conglomerate
Each venture filled a gap left by exclusion.
1898
Hygienic Manufacturing Company founded in Kansas City, Missouri, selling baking powder and toiletries.
1911
Company moves to Chicago with 50+ products and roughly 400 door-to-door salespeople.
1916
Half-Century Magazine launched as a marketing vehicle aimed at Black women.
1922
Assumes presidency of Douglass National Bank; commissions the Overton Building on South State Street.
1924
Victory Life Insurance Company founded; branches in eight states by 1925.
1925
Half-Century phased out; Chicago Bee launched.
1927
Victory Life licensed in New York; Overton wins the Spingarn Medal and Harmon gold medal.
1932
Douglass National Bank closes.
1946
Overton dies; son Everett takes over Overton Hygienic.
1983
Overton Hygienic closes under grandson Anthony Overton III.
Exclusion creates a market, but it doesn't make the market safe. Of 134 Black-owned banks founded between 1888 and 1934, nine survived the Depression. The customers established firms refused to serve were also the ones whose assets, mostly real estate in segregated neighborhoods, were most vulnerable in a crash. The opportunity and the risk came from the same discrimination.
Tactic: When you enter a market that established firms have refused to serve, assume your customers' assets are more exposed to a downturn than the market average and keep reserves accordingly.
Principle 8
Never let one company quietly become another's lender
This is the lesson from Overton's failure. Douglass National and Victory Life shared a building and a president, and over a long period Overton moved the insurer's money into the bank without authorization. In good years this went unnoticed. When real estate values in Black Chicago fell and both companies' assets lost value together, the transfers came to light. Overton lost the insurer, the bank failed, and he lost the reputation that had made him "the merchant prince."
The underlying mistake was treating several companies as one. A conglomerate's strength is having separate businesses, and when money moves among them without disclosure, their troubles also spread to one another. An insurer that funds a bank turns a bank failure into a threat to policyholders.
Tactic: Keep every entity you control financially separate, and require any transfer between them to be written down, disclosed, and approved by someone other than you.
Principle 9
Keep the asset you could explain to a stranger
After the Depression, Overton kept the cosmetics company and the newspaper. The cosmetics company was the business he understood best and the one that anyone could understand: it made powder and sold it to women who wanted it. It held no deposits and owed no one long-term payouts. It ran for another fifty years, through his son and grandson.
V
What Survived
The empire's components and their fates.
| Venture | Business model | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Overton Hygienic | Consumer goods, repeat purchase | Kept to 1983 |
| Chicago Bee | Newspaper | Kept; folded 1947 |
| Half-Century Magazine | Marketing channel | Retired 1925 |
| Victory Life Insurance | Policyholder reserves | Ousted as president |
| Douglass National Bank | Deposits, real estate exposure | Closed 1932 |
The table shows a clear pattern. The businesses that handled other people's money, the bank and the insurer, failed when their assets lost value. The businesses that sold something people bought and used survived. Overton's flagship company outlasted his empire because its model was simple.
Tactic: As you diversify, keep at least one business with simple, repeat-purchase economics that could carry you if everything else fails.
Principle 10
Fund the enterprise, not the persona
At his peak Overton owned no car and walked to work. After his wife died he lived in his children's spare bedrooms. Weems compares him to Buffett, a deal-maker who cared little for what wealth could buy. His contemporary Binga moved into a white neighborhood and was attacked for it again and again. Overton put his money into buildings that housed his businesses, not into a house that displayed his wealth.
That frugality helped him survive. A founder who doesn't need an expensive lifestyle has more freedom when the business struggles. When Overton lost most of his fortune, he did not also lose a way of life he had come to depend on, because he had never adopted one.
The persona he invented was the inflated résumé, not a display of wealth. He held back from spending money on himself and still couldn't resist exaggerating his history.
Tactic: Keep your personal spending low enough that a collapse of your business wouldn't force a collapse of your household.
Principle 11
Write the record before someone writes the myth
Overton's papers are gone, and Weems describes him as "an enigma" and "a mysterious figure." Part of the reason is that no archive survived. Part of it is that Overton spread false stories about his past, and they hardened into the accepted version for nearly a century: the law degree, the judgeship, the early success. When his real history was finally reconstructed, it showed a man more interesting than the myth, one who had failed repeatedly in his twenties and succeeded in his thirties.
A founder who doesn't keep a record leaves others to tell the story, and a founder who embellishes it gives them false material. Overton did both. As a result he went largely unrecognized for decades, and recognition came only when a historian with a professional reason to write a biography found him.
Tactic: Keep a dated, honest record of your decisions, including the failures, and store it somewhere it will outlast you.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Robert E. Weems Jr., to The Community Voice, 2020I compare him with Warren Buffett. Overton enjoyed the investing, the deal making, but he was low key, non-materialistic. He didn't own an automobile, and the widowed Overton usually lived in his grown children's spare bedroom.
— Robert E. Weems Jr., to The Community Voice, 2020I think this makes him more complex than just a man with a King Midas touch who was successful at everything.
— Made-in-Chicago MuseumTelling the story of Overton's success can sometimes run the risk of metaphorically "powdering over" the glaring racial disharmony that always undermined his more idealistic vision.
— Ghian Foreman, owner of the former Anthony Overton Elementary SchoolThe community needs the ability to remember how to dream. How to imagine. How to see the beauty in themselves. How to see what's possible.
Maxims
- The insult is the opening. Customers whom established firms demean will be loyal to a company that treats them with respect.
- Start ordinary. Baking powder built the retail relationships that face powder later used.
- Control the context. Owning the publication meant controlling which ads appeared next to yours.
- Choose spokespeople, don't hide behind them. Representing customers through people like them builds trust, and using them as cover eventually gets exposed.
- Arrive before the crowd. Overton moved to Chicago in 1911, before most of the Great Migration arrived.
- Buildings outlast papers. His records were lost, and the terra cotta buildings are still standing.
- Exclusion can create a market and a risk at once. The customers no one serves often hold the assets most exposed in a downturn.
- Keep the companies financially separate. Undisclosed transfers between entities let one company's failure take down another.
- The simplest business survives. The powder company outlasted the bank by fifty years.
- Tell the true story yourself. The real record of failure and recovery was more convincing than the myth he invented.
