A.G. Gaston, The Man Who Bankrolled the Movement

Arthur George Gaston was born in Demopolis, Alabama in eighteen ninety-two, the grandson of an enslaved man. He moved to Birmingham in nineteen oh-five as a boy with his mother, who worked as a cook for a white family. His formal education ended at the tenth grade.

By the time the nineteen sixty-three Birmingham campaign began, Gaston had built what he described as a forty-million-dollar business empire: a burial insurance company, a savings and loan bank, a business college, a construction company, two radio stations, two cemeteries, and a motel. He was one of the wealthiest Black businessmen in the United States.

Gaston's motel at Fifth Avenue North, which opened in July of nineteen fifty-four and was listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book, became the campaign's headquarters. Martin Luther King stayed in Room Thirty, which organizers called the War Room. Shuttlesworth and King held strategy sessions in the motel's meeting rooms. Press conferences were held in its courtyard.

When King was arrested in April, campaign organizers initially refused bail on purpose, hoping to keep national attention fixed on Birmingham, and Gaston was among the business leaders who helped arrange funds toward his eventual release. When the children who marched in May were arrested, labor unions and local leaders, Gaston among them, helped raise the bail money that freed them, after Bull Connor's forces had turned fire hoses on them in the streets.

On May eleventh, the night after a Birmingham campaign agreement was announced, the Klan bombed the motel. Gaston was uninjured. The motel was repaired. On January twelfth of two thousand seventeen, President Barack Obama declared the area surrounding it the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument.