Rogers, John W. Jr.

Impact on the world

Founded Ariel Investments at age 24 with $10,000 from family and friends, building it into the nation's first and largest Black-owned asset management firm, now overseeing approximately $14 billion in assets; in 2023 the firm launched Project Black, a private equity fund aimed at building mid-size Black- and Latino-owned suppliers into top-tier vendors for S&P 500 companies.

Life & background

The son of a Tuskegee Airman father who later became a Chicago juvenile court judge, and grandson of J.B. Stradford, the Tulsa hotelier and Black Wall Street entrepreneur already profiled in this collection, Rogers developed an early interest in investing after his father began giving him stocks instead of toys for birthdays and Christmas starting at age 12. After graduating from Princeton, where he captained the basketball team under Hall of Fame coach Pete Carril, and working as a stockbroker, Rogers founded Ariel Capital Management in 1983 with $10,000 raised from family and friends, securing Howard University's endowment as the firm's first major client. He built Ariel into the largest minority-owned investment firm in the country, while also backing 1990s legislation requiring Illinois and Chicago pension funds to track investments with minority-owned money managers, and funding the Ariel Community Academy, a Chicago public school built around financial literacy education.

Sources

1. Ariel Investments; American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Forbes