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

Herman J. Russell (author); Bob Andelman (author) & Andrew Young (Introduction)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0912777842 ISBN 13: 9780912777849

Publisher: Chicago Review Press, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Young was born in New Orleans in 1932. In 1960, he joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He served as its executive director from 1964 to 1970. He was elected to three terms in Congress and two terms as Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia. He was the first African American to be appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0912777842
• ISBN 13: 9780912777849
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304