ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 21, 1996 TAG: 9601220111
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BIRMINGHAM, ALA.
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: Associated Press|
A.G. Gaston, the millionaire black businessman who bailed Martin Luther King Jr. out of a Birmingham jail in 1963 for fear the civil rights movement would fall into turmoil without him, died Friday at the age of 103.
Gaston, the grandson of a slave, built a fortune in insurance and banking that helped give him standing with some in Birmingham's white power structure and allowed him to act as a go-between during the civil rights struggle in the 1960s.
It was a difficult position for Gaston. Some in the black community considered him an Uncle Tom, and Gaston himself was torn. He was talking on the telephone to David Vann when, looking out his office window, he saw police use dogs and fire hoses against young black demonstrators.
``When the hoses were turned on the children, he said, `I can't talk to you anymore,' and he hung up,'' Vann, who was then a lawyer and later mayor, recalled.
Gaston posted the $5,000 bail to free King from jail following his 1963 arrest for marching without a permit. King wanted to stay behind bars as a political statement, but Gaston feared for the movement without his leadership.
Gaston was born in Demopolis in the old plantation country of western Alabama, moved to Birmingham as a youth and never made it past 10th grade.
In 1923, he founded the Booker T. Washington Insurance Co. with $500 and began selling policies to black steelworkers. He also opened Citizens Federal Savings and Loan and a string of other companies that catered to blacks in the segregated city.
Gaston's holdings were estimated at more than $35 million before he sold the insurance company to its employees for $3.5 million, the value of its capital assets, in 1987.
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