Coleman, Warren Clay

Impact on the world

Built the nation's first Black-owned and operated cotton mill, employing over 300 African American workers at its peak, becoming, by some accounts, the wealthiest African American in the country by the turn of the century; the mill building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.

Life & background

Born into slavery as the son of an enslaved woman and a Confederate general, Coleman built a career as a merchant, real estate investor, and entrepreneur in Concord, North Carolina, becoming the wealthiest Black man in the state by the 1890s. Working with Black capitalists and white industrialist Washington Duke, he founded the Coleman Manufacturing Company, the first textile mill in the United States owned and operated by African Americans, which employed more than 300 Black workers at its peak and was promoted internationally at the 1900 Paris Exposition as 'the only Negro cotton mill in the U.S.' He used his wealth to subsidize tuition for students at Howard University and other historically Black colleges.

Sources

1. NCpedia; NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources