Charles Douglas and His World
February 13, 2023
IN HONOR of black history month, I recommend another essay by the late Elizabeth Wright, who wrote profiles of many successful black businessmen of the pre-civil rights era:
Like so many men of his era, Charles Henry Douglass seized opportunities when they came, and created them when they didn’t. Confident, enterprising and imaginative, he was perfectly matched for the world of business.
His career as a businessman, in Macon, Georgia, spanned 1898 to 1940, as he successfully weathered even the stock market crash of 1929. In the course of those years, he owned or leased close to 100 properties, along with restaurants, saloons, two movie theaters and a hotel.
He was president of the Middle Georgia Savings & Investment Co. for eight years, afterward serving as a director. Early in his career, he had bought shares in this bank (when it was the Georgia Loan & Savings Co.). It is also the place where he met the bank’s cashier, Fannie Appling, who was to become his wife. Respected as one of the black community’s most prosperous and influential citizens, he was credited with helping the city of Macon enlarge its business life.
Who was Douglass? He was a man whose mother and father died when he was barely out of his teens, leaving him to figure out how to support his two younger sisters. With only a rural elementary school education, he became an agricultural laborer. He held his next job, as a carriage driver for a doctor, while also working at a candy manufacturing plant. He managed to support the family until the mid-1890s, when both sisters married. Douglass then left Macon for more profitable work in another city. There, he saved money and returned to Macon in 1898, with $24 to spare.
With this, he bought a partnership in a small bicycle repair and rental business. Thus began a brilliant business career, to which he applied his savvy and intelligence. About the bicycle business, he said, “I did fairly well until the automobile craze came, then I sold out and went into the hotel and real estate business, in which I prospered.” Read More »