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

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

By Herman J Russell and Bob Andelman

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.

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Book Information

Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Publish Date: 08/01/2017
Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780912777849
ISBN-10: 0912777842
Language: English

Full Description

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 the Author

Herman J. Russell was the founder, CEO, and chairman of the board of H. J. Russell and Company and Concessions International, as well as a nationally recognized entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Atlanta civic leader. Over the course of the last five decades he built one of the nation's most profitable minority-owned business empires, transforming his father's one-man plastering company into a construction and real estate conglomerate.

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