Building Atlanta How I Broke Through Segregation to Launch a Business Empire

Born into a blue-collar family in the Jim Crow South, Herman J. Russell built a shoeshine business when he was twelve years old—and used the profits to buy a vacant lot where he built a duplex while he was still a teen. Over the next fifty years, he continued to build businesses, amassing one of the nation’s most profitable minority-owned conglomerates.

In Building Atlanta, Russell shares his inspiring life story and reveals how he overcame racism, poverty, and a debilitating speech impediment to become one of the most successful African American entrepreneurs, Atlanta civic leaders, and unsung heroes of the civil rights movement. Not just a typical rags-to-riches story, Russell achieved his success through focus, planning, and humility, and he shares his winning advice throughout. As a millionaire builder before the civil rights movement took hold and a friend of Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young, he quietly helped finance the civil rights crusade, putting up bond for protestors and providing the funds that kept King’s dream alive. He provides a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at the role the business community, both black and white working together, played in Atlanta’s peaceful progression from the capital of the racially divided Old South to the financial center of the New South.

Contents

Introduction by Former US Ambassador Andrew Young

Prologue

PART I: Growing, Working, and Learning

1. Life, One Word at a Time

2. High School Hero

3. Tuskegee Institute: An Educated Class

PART II: H. J. Russell & Company: Atlanta’s Do-It-All Contractor

4. Black Entrepreneurship Takes Hold, Part 1

5. Otelia Hackney: A Black Woman Emerges

PART III: Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement

6. Swimming at the Deep End of Social Change

7. Black Entrepreneurship Takes Hold, Part 2

8. My Big Greek Brother (From Another Mother)

9. Desegregating the Good Ol’ Boys

10. A Leg Up and Over: Joint Ventures

PART IV: It’s a Living

11. Before Takeoff and Landing, Visit Us at Concessions International

12. The Beer Years

13. The H. J. Russell Institute of Good Common Sense

14. Mixing Business and Politics

PART V: Family First

15. The Wonders of Otelia

16. Born Leaders

17. . . . And Hello to Sylvia

PART VI: Sixty Years Later

18. All the Rest of My Days

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Authors

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