Induction Year: 1981

Isidor Weil

  • September 20th, 2021

Possessing little more than a penchant for hard work, a keen eye for business, and a measure of good luck, young Weil was able to start his own business at the age of twenty-two.

By the time he died, at the age of eighty-nine, his business dealings spanned the globe, and Weil himself, reported the Montgomery Advertiser, was “one of the best-known cotton merchants in the world.”

When he first arrived in this country, thirteen-year-old Isidor Weil probably had less grandiose dreams. Born in Otterstadt, Rhine-Bavaria in 1856, he was the eldest of twelve children of Aaron and Magdalene Weil. In August of 1869, Isidor and his eleven-year-old brother Herman-neither of whom spoke English – sailed from Bremen to New York. From there they traveled to Huntsville, Alabama, where they made their home with two of their uncles, Isaiah and Herman Weil, who had come to the South prior to the Civil War.

In Huntsville, Isidor and his brother attended school and learned the language and customs of their adopted country. Sometime in the mid-1870s, the young Weil brothers moved to Opelika to live and work with their mother’s brother, Mose Lemle, who operated a general store. Like other merchants in the South, Lemle extended credit to his customers, most of whom were cotton farmers, for goods purchased throughout the year. The farmers then paid their debt at harvest time with a portion of their crops. Isidor was put in charge of converting these crops into cash.

His success at this undertaking was such that the young Weil was soon able to talk his uncle into buying cotton directly from the farmers and selling it to the local mills. By 1878, the services of the Weils were in such demand that Isidor and his brother Herman, in partnership with their uncle Lemle, formally went into business as cotton buyers and exporters. In 1884, when Mose Lemle died, Isidor named the firm Weil Brothers.

By 1887, the year Isidor married Eda Oppenheimer of Cincinnati, Ohio, he was already well established as a successful cotton merchant. He was also known as one of the most public-spirited citizens in Opelika, where he took an active interest in the town’s commercial, civic and political affairs, and where he served over the years as alderman, as a director in the local banks, and as chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee for that district.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the company expanded rapidly as the Weils found new markets in the Southeast, in New England, and abroad. From the ports of Mobile, Savannah, and Charleston, they shipped cotton to England and to other countries across the continent. Several of the export practices Weil Brothers employed became standard operating procedures throughout the industry. The cash-on-arrival form of payment they instituted (in which the buyer cables funds to the seller’s bank when a vessel is first sighted in a foreign port) is still in use today in England, France, Germany, and other European countries.

In 1889, Herman Weil withdrew from the firm and Emil Weil, another of Isidor’s brothers, became associated with the business. By the turn of the century, Weil Brothers had developed into such a large and complex network of services that the brothers thought it necessary to move the business closer to the shipping and distribution centers of the region. So, in 1903, Isidor Weil moved his growing business and his growing family (now two sons, Adolph and Leonel, and a daughter Helen) to Montgomery.

Once again he took an active interest in the welfare of the community. Weil was one of the organizers and directors of the Exchange National Bank; he served as director of the Alabama National Bank Company, the Union Bank & Trust Company, the Capitol National Bank, and the Peoples Cotton Mills. He helped organize and served as vice-president of the Memorial Hospital, was a director of the Anti-Tuberculosis League, the Associated Charities of Montgomery, and other public welfare organizations.

During World War I, Weil became a leading member of several committees in charge of the sale of Liberty Bonds. He chaired three separate drives to raise funds in Montgomery for European relief after the war and was Alabama State Chairman for the Jewish Relief Fund. A thirty-second degree Scottish Rite Mason and a member of the Shrine, Weil was also an active member of the Reform Jewish congregation, Kahl Montgomery, which he served as a member of the board of directors and as president.

When Isidor’s sons, Adolph and Leonel, returned from service after World War I, they took over management of the company and were soon joined in the business by Lucien Loeb, Isidor’s son-in-law, and Alvin Weil, Emil’s son. Isidor Weil, however, never retired from the company he had spent his life building, and he continued to take an active interest in Weil Brothers’ affairs for the next two and a half decades.

These were years of growth and expansion for the company. They were also years of change as the transportation of cotton shifted from steamboats to trains and trucks, and as the center of the cotton industry began to move slowly from the Southeast to the far West. Weil Brothers shifted with the times. They opened offices in Memphis, Dallas, Houston – and later in Fresno, California – and maintained offices in New York, where the company had become a clearing member of the New York Cotton Exchange.

After World War II, when cotton production increased dramatically in many other countries, Weil Brothers opened affiliated offices in Mexico, and it pioneered the marketing of Central American cotton, especially in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Salvador. As the trend in world textile production shifted from Europe to the Orient, a selling office was opened in Osaka, Japan.

In the 1950s, Adolph’s two sons, Adolph, Jr., and Robert, assumed the company’s management, and under their direction, the firm has continued to expand. With two partnerships in Mexico and South America, Weil Brothers now deal in cotton in some twenty-four countries throughout the world, buying and selling between 800,000 to 1,000,000 bales per year through its extensive affiliated network.

Isidor Weil, of course, did not live to see all of his company’s growth. Before he died in 1946, however, he had watched the small business he had begun in 1878 develop into a worldwide concern. He had seen the fruits of his labor passed on to his children and to his children’s children, and he must have understood, as perhaps only an immigrant can, what it is to attain his own version of the American Dream.

Robert Jemison, Jr.

  • September 20th, 2021

Energetic, independent, and adventurous, he was the inheritor of a pioneering spirit that had characterized the Jemison family for generations.

His great-grandparents had immigrated to the colonies in 1742, settling on a farm in Pennsylvania; his grandparents had moved to Augusta, Georgia, sometime before the start of the Revolutionary War; and his parents, prosperous Georgia landowners, sought out the rich farmlands of West Alabama and built there a plantation so productive and well-cultivated that it came to be known as The Garden.

It was near Augusta, Georgia, in 1802 that Robert Jemison, Jr.* was born. He attended the University of Georgia, read law, and in 1821 moved with his parents, William and Sarah Jemison, to Alabama. The family settled briefly in Greene County and then moved to the village of Tuscaloosa. In 1826 the elder Jemison transported his family to Pickens County where he founded and developed his prosperous plantation, The Garden, and helped finance blacksmith shops, lumber mills, and other services for the community.

Robert Jemison, Jr., who lived and worked at The Garden for ten years, returned to Tuscaloosa in 1836 and married Priscilla Taylor of Mobile. They had one child; a daughter named Cherokee. Jemison and his wife were said to be particularly fond of that Indian name because the story goes, several generations back the Cherokees had done a favor for the Taylor family and requested, in return, that the family perpetuate their name. Jemison more than complied with his wife’s ancestor al obligation by giving the name, not only to his daughter but to the large plantation he built beyond Northport.

Like his father before him, Robert Jemison was an enterprising businessman. In the 1820s he began to buy up small tracts of property in several counties. As the size of his holdings grew, he added buildings, im­proved the efficiency of his farming operations, and added grist and flour mills. By 1857, he owned six plantations, the largest of which was the 4000-acre Cherokee Place.

Industrial and commercial enterprises also interested him. He invested heavily in stagecoach lines, operated a large livery stable in Tuscaloosa, and built a thriving lumber and sawmill business. He erected a foundry in Talladega County, operated several surface coal mines near Brookwood, and constructed a plank road from the mines to Tuscaloosa. The lumber for all his enterprises, as well as for his several homes, came from his own mills; the labor, from his slaves – estimated to total nearly 500 at one point. Not surprisingly, Jemison was considered “the most enterprising all-around citizen in Tuscaloosa.”

It was as a statesman, however, that the people of Alabama knew him best. He first entered politics in the mid-1830s by filling a vacancy in the state legislature, then located in Tuscaloosa. In 1837 he ran on the Whig ticket for that same legislative post and won. For the next twenty-five years, he continued to win elections, serving in the statehouse of representatives until 1850 and in the state senate from 1851 to 1863. During his long political career, Jemison gained a reputation as a skilled debater who would speak his mind regardless of the unpopularity of his view. “The duty of a statesman,” Jemison reportedly said, “is to lead and not to follow popular sentiment. If he finds public opinion taking the wrong direction, it is his duty to throw himself in the breach and turn it the right way.”

Jemison frequently threw himself into the breach. He was a determined supporter of a system of railroads for Alabama, an active anti-abolitionist, and he fought tenaciously – and successfully – for the construction of a state hospital for the insane (Bryce). It was in 1847, though, that he took on what may have been the most challenging problem of his career – the failing financial affairs of the state of Alabama.

Jemison had long opposed the system of state banks. ‘This hydra of modern banking,” as he called it, had led to wild speculation schemes, to the panic of 1837, the failure of the banks, and to public debt that by 1847 had reached crisis proportions. Chosen by his constituents and the legislature to lead the state out of its financial mire, Jemison advocated the liquidation of state banks and the establishment of a well-regulated system of private stock banks. He was convinced that Alabama, by reason of her abundant resources, was amply able to pay her debts, and he dismissed arguments that a tax bill commensurate with the wants of the state would be disastrously unpopular. As chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, he introduced a revenue bill that, once passed, revolutionized the state’s system of taxation by establishing a broader and more equitable distribution of the tax burden. Even Jemison’s staunchest political adversaries applauded his skill in introducing sound business practices to the management of the state’s financial affairs.

In January of 1861, Jemison once again attempted to influence the direction of his state, but this time he was not successful. Representing Tuscaloosa County in the Secession Convention in Montgomery, Jemison argued against seceding from the Union. Such drastic action was premature and impractical, he reasoned; the Convention possessed no reliable evidence to suggest that the North planned to invade the South; the matter deserved careful consideration; perhaps there was still room for compromise. Amid the Convention’s emotional atmosphere, Jemison’s efforts to discuss the issue on practical grounds proved ultimately futile. Once the Ordinance of Secession passed, however, he stood behind the majority opinion and supported the Confederacy with all the resources at his disposal.

In 1863 he was chosen president of the state senate, and that same year he was elected by an overwhelming margin to suc­ceed the late W. L. Yancey in the Senate of the Confederate States of America. There he served actively until the fall of the Confederacy.

Senator Jemison was in Tuscaloosa in April of 1865 when Federal troops invaded the city and burned factories and mills and The University of Alabama. He escaped imprisonment by hiding in a swamp outside of town while soldiers searched his home, a large Italianate villa that still stands on Greensboro Avenue.

After the war, with most of his property destroyed, Jemison remained in Tuscaloosa and began to piece together the remnants of what had once been a vast system of enterprises. Although his health was failing, he built a ferry service across the Black Warrior River and devoted much of his time to the work of rebuilding The University of Alabama.

When he died following a long illness on October 17, 1871, the citizens of Tuscaloosa and Northport closed their shops and businesses and turned out en masse for his funeral. It was but one of many tributes paid throughout the state to Robert Jemison, Jr. – a man whose statesmanship, business acumen, and pioneering spirit had contributed to the development of the nineteenth century – Alabama to a degree that few of his generation could match.

Authur George Gaston

  • September 20th, 2021

Eleven-year-old Arthur George Gaston believed in himself.

He was going to do something. He was going to be somebody. In some communities, such optimism might have been common in young boys his age, but in a poor, black community in turn-of-the-century Alabama, optimism about the future was an understandably rare commodity. Young Art Gaston, however, was a rare young man.

He was born in Demopolis, Alabama, on July 4, 1892. His father had died when young Gaston was only a few years old, and his mother had had to seek work in the city. Consequently, Art was reared by his grandparents, Joe and Idella Gaston, both of whom were former slaves. By farming and holding extra jobs with the white people in town, they had managed to buy a small farm and build with their own hands the log cabin in which their grandson was later born.

As self-reliant as his grandparents and as unafraid of hard work, eleven-year-old Art began his first business venture in his own back yard, charging neighborhood children a button each to ride on the old barn door swing that his grandfather had set up for him in a nearby oak. Business was unbelievably good, and before long Art had several cigar boxes full of buttons. He had also learned his first business lesson: find a need and fill it. He would remember that.

Later that year he moved to Birmingham where his mother, Rosie Gaston, now a cook for a wealthy white family in town, enrolled him in the Tuggle Institute, a school for black children in the hills of north-west Birmingham. Granny Tuggle, who had started the school in 1908, was a former slave who knew firsthand the difficulties her young charges would face if they were thrust into the world without a sense of responsibility and at least a rudimentary education. Granny liked Art Gaston and she worked him especially hard. During his years at the Institute, he learned to organize his time between his studies and the many odd jobs he picked up on the side. By the age of 18, he had completed the tenth grade and had learned from experience the difficult time blacks had finding anything but the most menial employment.

Determined to secure something better for himself, Gaston joined the Army. Already a seasoned soldier by the time the U.S. entered World War I, he served in France as a Regimental Supply Sergeant and was decorated with his entire unit for “valor beyond the call of duty.” Having served his country well, Gaston hoped, as did thousands of other returning Negro soldiers, that a grateful nation would offer them opportunities never available to blacks before. Disappointed to find that nothing had changed, the self-reliant Gaston supported himself as a laborer while he began to create opportunities of his own.

He noticed that the black community frequently collected donations at funerals to help pay burial expenses. Deciding that burial insurance would be both helpful to the community and profitable, he launched the Booker T. Washington Burial Society in 1923. It was a daring venture for a young man with little capital, but the idea was sound, and by the end of the year, the young entrepreneur had to hire additional agents to handle his burgeoning business.

With prospects for the future considerably brighter now, Gaston married his childhood sweetheart, Creola Smith, and asked his new father-in-law to join him in business. The partnership worked well, and before long the two were able to purchase a funeral home which they promptly renamed Smith and Gaston, Funeral Directors, Inc.

Then, in 1939 his father-in-law died, and within six months, so did Creola. Devastated by the loss of his family, Gaston devoted himself to his work in the years that followed. He listened attentively to the advice of other businessmen; he learned to digest a profit-and-loss statement and to keep a sharp eye out for sound investments. His sharp eye also landed on a young college graduate, Minnie Gardner, a particularly attractive and resourceful young lady who soon became his wife. Minnie turned out to be one of Gaston’s greatest assets.

From the beginning, Gaston’s businesses had suffered from his inability to find well-trained Negro clerical staff. To solve his own problems and to help his community at the same time, he started the Booker T. Washington Business College. Minnie took over the College’s management and under her guidance, the school grew faster than either the insurance company or the funeral home had in their infant years.

The pattern of Gaston’s success continued. By helping himself he had helped his community, and he felt an obligation to pass on what he had learned. “Study as hard as you can, save a part of everything you earn, and contribute to your community to the limit of your ability,” he told civics classes, church groups, anyone who would listen. ”The world does not owe you a living, only the chance to earn a living based on your merit.”

Gaston followed his own advice. The black community lacked first-class motels, restaurants, nursing homes, and pharmacies, so over the years, he built these and more. He founded a savings and loan association, a realty and investment corporation, a broadcasting company (WENN Radio), a fire insurance company, and he built a 1.5 million dollar building in Birmingham to house his enterprises. He served on the board of more than twenty-five local, state, and national civic organizations, and he founded and supported the A.G. Gaston Boys’ Club.

Respected by both black and white communities in Birmingham, Gaston was turned to repeatedly for leadership during the civil rights riots of the 1960s. Although his home was burned and his motel bombed, he remained a voice of reason. He appealed to all the citizens of Birmingham to “live together in human dignity as American citizens and sons of God.” Ironically, his moderate stand angered radical blacks, who wanted to expand the disorder, and conservative whites, who criticized him for providing financial assistance to civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., for whom Gaston had provided bail.

His sound leadership did not escape the attention of President John F. Kennedy, however, invited him to the White House for a state dinner. Nor have his contributions and achievements escaped the attention of many others. Gaston is a member of the Alabama Academy of Honor, the recipient of honorary doctorates from nine institutions in this country and abroad, including one from The University of Alabama; and “A.G. Gaston Appreciation Days” have been celebrated by Demopolis, Brighton, Birmingham, and Jefferson County.

The trip from a Demopolis farm to one of the leading citizens of Alabama was a long one, but A. G. Gaston more than realized his childhood dream. Overcoming poverty, prejudice, and limited education, he amassed corporate holdings in excess of thirty-five million dollars, and, along the way, he improved his community and the lives of the people in it, both black and white. His method was simple: He believed in himself, he believed in God, and he believed, as did George Washington Carver, in “the great human law, which is universal and eternal, that merit, no matter under what skin found, is in the long run, recognized and rewarded.”

James McDonald Comer

  • September 20th, 2021

In the art of enlightened leadership, Donald Comer had few peers.

When he died at the age of 85, newspapers editorials throughout the region – and many in other parts of the country – paid tribute to him as a premier textile industrialist and a leader in civic, religious, and political affairs.

Most importantly, though, they paid tribute to Donald Comer the man, the gentle humanitarian who could look at every problem from the other fellow’s point of view. Following his personal motto, “Live and Help Live,” he became not only one of the nation’s most respected industry leaders, but one of the most affectionately regarded Southern businessmen of his time.

The facts of his life tell the story: He was born into a distinguished Barbour County family in 1877, the third of nine children of Braxton Bragg and Eva Jane Harris Comer. In such a large family, young Comer learned early the importance of “consideration of others.” Undoubtedly, he also learned the principles and responsibilities of leadership, for his father, Braxton Bragg Comer, understood these concepts well. Governor of the state from 1907 to 1911, the elder Comer established himself as one of Alabama’s most progressive statesmen. His far-reaching educational policies, in particular, benefited the state’s entire educational system and made possible, among many other things, the first construction at The University of Alabama in twenty years.

After serving four years in the Philippines as a first lieutenant in the Army, Donald Comer, as he was known all his life, married Gertrude Miller of Reading, Pennsylvania, and in 1903, he joined his brother Fletcher in managing the family’s 30,000-acre plantation in South Alabama. When his father became governor in 1907, Donald Comer moved with his growing family to Birmingham to manage Avondale Mills, the thriving textile industry that his father had founded ten years earlier. Here Donald Comer spent his life, becoming president in 1927, chairman of the board in 1935, and chairman of the executive committee in 1951. During the more than half a century he devoted to Avondale Mills, Comer helped develop it into one of the largest textile chains in the country and one of the nation’s leaders in employee-management relations.

Soon after he joined the industry, Donald Comer began finding ways to improve the lives of his workers-an an activity he would continue throughout his life. He started a Boy Scout troop for the children of mill employees that expanded over the years until there were more than fifty such troops in Avondale Mills towns; he built schools for children and adults; he established a Home Loan Association and sold village houses at low prices with low payments (by 1963 more than 85 percent of Avondale’s employees were homeowners). Concerned about opportunities available to his employees in their leisure time, Comer hired music teachers, provided instruments, and started an employees’ band; he began “Cotton Crafts” clubs for retired workers; and once, while vacationing in Atlantic City, he decided that every family working for him ought to have a chance to enjoy the beach, so he built a camp in Florida and took the first busload of mill families down for what became a yearly vacation.

In 1938, Donald Comer began one of the nation’s first profit-sharing plans. By 1941 the program was in effect in all the company’s plants with employees drawing profit-sharing checks amounting to forty percent of their base pay in some years. Comer saw it as a good investment. ‘This isn’t profit-sharing,” he once said, “it’s a partnership with people.”

Mr. Comer created “partnerships with people” in his other business dealings as well. He had the capacity, the Birmingham News noted, “to discuss cotton with an eye and a heart for the cotton farmer, the man who planted and picked the cotton, the ginner, the warehouseman and all who touched it…Donald Comer had a way of seeing everybody’s problem and wanting them all to come out well.”

A number of the problems Comer saw and – helped to solve – were nationwide. In the 1930s he worked to strengthen child labor laws and to bring into line cotton firms paying less than the minimum wage As President of the American Cotton Manufacturers Association, he fought to protect the industry from the influx of unrestricted Japanese imports and served on a U.S. mission to Japan that resulted in the establishment of voluntary quotas by the Japanese. During World War II, he served on the National Defense Advisory Commission and the War Labor Board, and in 1948, he returned to Japan at the request of General Douglas MacArthur to assist the Japanese in rebuilding their war-shattered textile industry.

Concerned about the high level of unemployment in Alabama, Comer led the movement to convert war plants in Talladega County to peacetime uses, and he worked tirelessly toward the establishment of the Coosa River Newsprint Company. In 1942, he joined with many others in creating the Southern Research Institute, which he served as a trustee for the rest of his life.

Devoting much of his time to civic and religious activities, Comer was a member of the Board of Stewards of Birmingham’s First Methodist Church. He served on the Laymen’s National Committee of the American Bible Society; he was on the board of the Y.M.C.A. for more than half his life; and for many years, he was chairman of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

Donald Comer’s unstinting contributions to the lives of others were recognized repeatedly during his lifetime. In 1944 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Birmingham Southern College; in 1947 Dixie Business Magazine named him the “South’s Man of the Year”; and in 1952, the citizens of Sylacauga held a “Donald Comer Day” celebration that was attended by more than 12,000 people. The Society for the Advancement of Management presented him its National Human Relations Award for 1953, and in 1961, B’nai B’rith of Birmingham bestowed on him its humanitarian award.

Still working five or six days a week after he reached the age of 80, Mr. Comer never stopped pursuing his many interests, and he never failed to keep in touch with the people who worked for him. Long before he died in 1963, it was clear that his life-long “partnership with people” had been an unquestioned success. He was, as one of his many eulogists put it, “an outstanding example of the social-consciousness of American businessmen, one of the bright distinguishing marks of the modern-day free enterprise system.”

But Donald Comer’s deeds speak for themselves. As another eulogist wrote, “His life represents its own memorial wreath, and it is and was a lovely green accomplishment.”

X