Black Titan: A. G. Gaston and the Making of a Black Millionaire.

Black Titan: A. G. Gaston and the Making of a Black Millionaire by Carol Jenkins and Elizabeth Gardner Hines One World/Ballantine, January 2004 $24.95, ISBN 0-345-45347-6

For African Americans who have come from the depths, stories of struggle and achievement are particularly compelling. This biography of Arthur George Gaston recounts the fascinating tale of one who rose from the iron mines of Birmingham to become Alabama's first black millionaire. Here is the American success story in black, another chapter in the growing literature on entrepreneurs who accumulated phenomenal wealth in the urban industrial belt of the Jim Crow South.

Gaston represents the second post-Emancipation generation of black business owners who thrived on the crest of segregation. Grandchild of slave-born sharecroppers, he built a business empire on a 10th-grade education, a work ethic inspired by Booker T. Washington and an unrelenting chase of the dollar. "Find a need and fill it," he postulated.

From selling lunches and lending money to his fellow miners, he progressed to corner the market on Black Death in Birmingham with his burial society, funeral home, insurance company and cemetery. Over the next decades, he would expand into real estate, banking and radio. By the time the Civil Rights Movement came to Birmingham in the 1960s, Gaston was in his seventies, a conservative, behind-the-scenes player, negotiating with white power for limited concessions. His Gaston Motel became Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s headquarters, but his accommodating gradualism inevitably clashed with the movement.

Black Titan offers an inside perspective. Its authors are Gaston's in-laws: his wife's niece, Carol Jenkins, and Jenkins's daughter, Elizabeth Hines. with striking candor, they address Gaston's deference to whites, his financial improprieties during the Depression, and his difficulty in making friends.

Justice to this remarkable man and his career, however, demands a more rigorous scholarship. Surely, company files could have elaborated on the development of his businesses. Research of the Federal census and county court records would have filled gaping holes ha the family's history. For a man who rived until 1996 to the age of 103, the oral record presented here of Gaston, his kin, friends, and business associates is surprisingly sparse. Based largely on secondary sources, Black Titan fails to take us significantly beyond Gaston's autobiography, Green Power: the Successful Way of A.G. Gaston (Troy Stale University Press, January 1978).

--Reviewed by Carole Merritt Carole Merritt is director of The Herndon Home and has written The Herndons: An Atlanta Family (University of Georgia Press, June 2002).