“The art of separating people from their money is, after all, the most important of all arts.”

— Atlanta Mutual weekly bulletin, Oct. 23, 1920

In 1905, just four decades removed from the end of the Civil War, Atlanta was a city where Black citizens were still an oppressed underclass, though a few had been able to carve out a bit of success and stability. Revs. James Bryant and J.A. Hopkins’ options for a messiah who fit their criteria were few.

Alonzo Herndon was a barber by trade, not a savior. The son of a white slave owner and an enslaved woman, Herndon was born in 1858 about 45 miles east of Atlanta. He worked as a sharecropper as a boy, scraping pennies together for years to try to save enough to leave the farm where he worked.

He eventually turned to cutting hair and in the early 1880s made his way to Atlanta. By 1904, he had worked his way to owning three barbershops that were considered some of the finest in the country, serving the upper crust of Atlanta’s white citizens.

Credit: Courtesy Atlanta Life Insurance Company

Credit: Courtesy Atlanta Life Insurance Company

Credit: AJC archives

Credit: AJC archives

In 1905, the reverends had to find a buyer for their fledgling Atlanta Benevolent Protective Association, a mutual aid organization they had set up to help provide for their poor, Black congregants in emergencies, or face shutting it down.

A Georgia law passed that year to weed out poorly managed, unethical associations meant that for Bryant and Hopkins’ organization to survive, it needed to give the state a $5,000 deposit (equivalent to $175,000 today) to protect policyholders.

If the reverends didn’t find a Black entrepreneur who could pay the deposit, they would have to close the association. They would have rather shut it down than sell it to a white-owned business, so they approached Herndon.

He had no experience running a mutual aid association but had a reputation as a trustworthy, honest man ― and, crucially, enough money from his barbershops and real estate holdings to cover the $5,000. Once the church leaders persuaded him to buy the association, Herndon reorganized it into the Atlanta Mutual Insurance Association in September 1905, making it one of the first Black-owned insurance companies registered under the new law.

Companies like Atlanta Mutual descended from the mutual aid and benevolence tradition among freed and enslaved African Americans in the 1800s, a way of taking care of their own in times of strife, according to Alexa Benson Henderson’s 1990 book, “Atlanta Life Insurance Company: Guardian of Black Economic Dignity.”

“Indeed, these associations aided significantly in the advancement of a group that was systematically isolated from the mainstream of American society,” Henderson wrote.

These groups were often tied to a church. Members paid an initiation fee and then periodic payments into a central pot. Each member received specific benefits when they were ill and upon death, their families received money to help with burial costs.

Credit: The Herndon Home

Credit: The Herndon Home

But Black populations in cities like Atlanta began to swell after Emancipation as rural African Americans moved to urban areas in search of opportunity. As the populations grew, so did economic need, which began to dwarf what churches could offer.

There needed to be larger, independent associations that were separate from the church to provide for Black Americans in times of emergency. White-owned insurance companies often refused to insure them, leading to the establishment of companies like the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. in 1898, which became one of the largest Black companies in the country, and Atlanta Mutual. What they offered was considered industrial insurance and geared toward the working class, meaning policyholders could purchase smaller amounts of insurance and pay weekly premiums instead of larger lump sums a few times a year.

When Herndon established Atlanta Mutual in 1905, the company had just three agents, one clerk and one room in an office building. Ten years later, it had become the largest Black industrial insurance company in the lower South with offices in Georgia and Alabama.

Herndon and the other leaders of the company pushed agents to work hard and bring in new business, highlighting the best and worst performers through a weekly bulletin that also disseminated company news and motivational words.

In 1922, Atlanta Mutual amended its charter to enable it to sell all classes of insurance and renamed itself the Atlanta Life Insurance Co. Two years later, the company had expanded to six additional states.

Atlanta Life eventually moved from the one-room office of its beginnings to a two-story brick building on Auburn Avenue, establishing itself as a key presence on the bustling Black business corridor that helped the neighborhood get its name, Sweet Auburn. Herndon, despite being enslaved in his early life and just a step away from it as a sharecropper, was a proud Black man, dedicated to uplifting his people.

At an Atlanta Life managers’ conference in 1924, he told the audience a story: “An American asked an Irishman, ‘If you were not an Irishman, what would you rather be?’ The Irishman replied, ‘If I were not an Irishman, I would rather be ashamed.’ So it is with me. If I were not a Negro, I would be ashamed.”

He viewed Atlanta Life not as a way to enrich himself (though he was the first Black millionaire in Atlanta) but as a way to employ and offer opportunities to others. He remarked in his 1919 annual report that traveling through the states where Atlanta Life had a presence and meeting the young men and women who worked for the company filled him with joy.

“(T)heir preparation for these places and positions were afforded them as a result of our company being able to give them a chance to prove their worth and ability,” Herndon wrote.

“The majority of these young people … own their own homes and are regarded as business factors in the several communities where they live. This is as it should be, and as a result of it I am happy,” he continued.

By the time Herndon died in 1927, Atlanta Life had grown to more than 700 employees and amassed $1 million in assets, valued at more than $18 million today.

His son, Norris, took over leadership of the company after his father’s death, seeing it through the turbulence of the Great Depression and then its rise in the abundant post-World War II years, providing home mortgages and business loans to African Americans alongside insurance.

“I thank God for Atlanta Life Insurance Company and pray that we do those things that are just and right.”

— Alonzo Herndon, undated

The Ku Klux Klan didn’t want Henrietta Antoinin to be registering Black voters, and they made that very clear.

In the early 1960s, Antoinin was picketing then-Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen’s office because he had refused to help her group of Black activists become certified to register voters. Then came the KKK, led by a grand dragon garbed in blood red robes and mask, marching across the street from Antoinin and her group.

“Scared us to death, of course,” she recalled.

But Atlanta Life’s leadership was not cowed.

Antoinin had joined the company in 1962, a fresh-faced 21-year-old woman who had wanted to work for the company “more than anything in the world.” Born in Atlanta under the tyranny of Jim Crow laws, Antoinin admired how Atlanta Life was founded by a former enslaved man and had grown to be not only a nationally successful company, but one that was focused on helping the Black community. When she joined, the company had about 2,500 employees across the country.

Credit: AJC archive at GSU Library

Credit: AJC archive at GSU Library

After she started working there, an actuary at the company, Jesse Hill Jr., wanted to start a campaign to register Black voters. White Southerners had made it as hard, and deadly, as possible for African Americans to exercise that Constitutional right. Hill wanted to fight back by getting a group of African Americans in Atlanta certified to register voters. Antoinin agreed to join the cause. Mayor Allen eventually decided to help them become certified after the incident with the KKK.

And throughout, Atlanta Life’s leaders supported the movement, paying Hill, Antoinin and a handful of others their full salaries as if they were still coming into the office, though they were posted at schools around Atlanta registering Black voters for 12 hours a day for months.

It was just one way Atlanta Life supported the Civil Rights Movement. Johnnie Carr, one of the company’s staff managers in Montgomery, Alabama, was part of the association that organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

And Atlanta Life didn’t just support its own employees’ activism; it was a benefactor to King and other activists. In 1963 alone, the company donated at least $20,000 to King and various civil rights organizations. Atlanta Life also bought lunch for picketers around the country and bailed young protesters out of jail, including Antoinin for picketing the post office.

Credit: AJC Staff

Credit: AJC Staff

“Our switchboard was connected throughout the country, and we got calls all over the country where kids need to be bailed out of jail,” she said.

Atlanta Life also helped finance mortgages for Black people trying to integrate white neighborhoods and those who wouldn’t have been able to finance their own home because of other exclusionary policies.

As a divorced, single woman in the mid-20th century, Antoinin had trouble finding a bank that would loan her money to buy a house. When she approached Atlanta Life’s leaders about her dilemma, they helped facilitate a mortgage for her.

“After working with Atlanta Life, I really saw what they meant when they say Atlanta Life was a quest for economic dignity for Black Americans,” Antoinin said.

In 1973, Hill was named president and CEO of Atlanta Life, taking over a company that was considered the largest Black privately owned and controlled business in the country. Under his leadership, Atlanta Life also worked to integrate white Atlanta businesses. Hill would recommend some of his best workers be hired by other companies in the city, though it was a loss for him, in the name of progress, according to Antoinin.

Initially during Hill’s tenure, the company continued acquiring other Black insurance companies and growing its business. Just like previous decades, the 1970s were a time of growth. By 1979, the company had $107 million in assets, equivalent to about $464 million today.

That year the company also began construction on a new six-story, 100,000-square-foot headquarters that opened in 1980, Atlanta Life’s 75th anniversary. The building was a celebratory moment for the company, one full of promise for the future, even as, down the street, Sweet Auburn had slid from its heyday as a Black business mecca into blight.

Auburn Avenue had gone from “being the richest Negro street in the world to being one of the scariest streets in Atlanta,” said Mtamanika Youngblood, former chair of the Historic District Development Corporation and Sweet Auburn Works, two organizations dedicated to revitalizing the neighborhood.

But soon, Atlanta Life would also face its own decline.

“Tell of your successes if you like, but let your failures go.”

— Atlanta Mutual bulletin Oct. 9, 1920

Antoinin, 88, worked for Atlanta Life for nearly five decades until she retired as vice president of public relations and communications in 2008. Talking about the company’s decline brings tears to her eyes.

“It’s painful,” she said.

Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com

Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com

The economic realities that prompted the company’s founding changed profoundly in the following decades. Beginning in the 1940s, African Americans started to get better wages than before, particularly by moving north for manufacturing jobs. Wins from the Civil Rights Movement supercharged those gains by opening more of the economy to Black people. By 1998, about 40% of African Americans considered themselves middle class, according to Brookings.

This changing economy meant Black Americans had more opportunities, as both employees and consumers. It’s something Youngblood experienced firsthand. She moved to Sweet Auburn in 1985, about a mile from the Atlanta Life headquarters, but, “to be frank, you know, no one from Atlanta Life ever reached out to us to ask us to buy insurance,” Youngblood said.

“It was, I suspect, struggling, as all Black businesses did during that time frame, with competing with now major white institutions that had kind of at least gotten comfortable with having Black people as customers,” she added.

In the 1990s, Atlanta Life agents were being poached by white companies who could pay more, Antoinin said. African Americans also had a plethora of insurance companies to choose from, that had more resources and could offer more competitive prices than Atlanta Life could.

Call it free market or call it irony, but the cause Atlanta Life had worked so hard to make a reality ― integration ― is part of what caused its decline.

“Its legacy is the legacy of Black institutions after desegregation,” Youngblood said.

Antoinin recalled things also starting to change in the early 1990s, after Hill resigned and new leadership was brought in who, she feels, strayed from Atlanta Life’s mission of economic dignity for Black Americans. Atlanta Life also moved away from its insurance focus because of economic headwinds, reorganizing into Atlanta Life Financial Group in 2001 and branching into financial advising and brokerage services.

A changing economy meant Atlanta Life went through a “tumultuous” time, Youngblood said. Her husband, George Howell, sat on the board of the company in the 1990s, and it was divided into two factions because the company was failing to compete against its peers.

“It was unlikely to get white subscribers, which is the history of desegregation,” she explained, “and it did very little outreach to Black customers. And so, it was shrinking, you know, as an insurance company. The question was, what was it?”

Her husband and some other board members thought it was an institution worth saving, but there was another faction looking at selling its real estate and moving on.

Atlanta Life merged with Jackson Securities, the investment banking firm founded by former Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, in 2007, a deal Antoinin said she voted against as a member of the board despite her decades-long friendship with Jackson.

“(Jackson Securities) were just about right in the red, and we were leaning, so why would you pick somebody that’s gonna pull you down even further?” she said.

Antoinin and Jackson went way back, their parents were friends and Jackson’s father baptized her, “but the company meant more to me than that, than just friendship.”

In 2010, Atlanta Life decided to put its Auburn Avenue headquarters on the market. The building hadn’t been full since 2001, a spokesperson said at the time. The company paid $12.5 million to construct that headquarters, Antoinin said, but sold it for less than $10 million to Georgia State University. The company moved its headquarters away from the neighborhood where it had been founded to a downtown skyscraper.

For Youngblood, the sale represented the loss of an iconic, one-of-a-kind Atlanta institution. Some time after Georgia State took over the headquarters, she had a meeting there and was struck that there was nothing noting the history of the building.

“It’s like it had all been erased,” Youngblood said.

And the decline continued. In 2017, an investment management firm owned by Atlanta Life, Herndon Capital Management, shut down after years of poor investments and hemorrhaging clients.

But soon, Atlanta Life was going to be hit by a bit of magic.

“I never brag about Atlanta Life being the biggest company in the world, but I am proud and anxious to have it the BEST company in the world.”

— Alonzo Herndon, undated

In 2018, Ryan Smith started looking into Atlanta Life for his boss, one of the most prominent Black business owners in the country, basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson. Smith was working for Magic Johnson Enterprises at the time and had helped him acquire a majority stake in the large insurance carrier EquiTrust.

Johnson was drawn to Herndon’s story, a former enslaved man going on to build this successful business, but it wasn’t until about 2021 that talks of acquiring Atlanta Life started in earnest. At that time, the company had less than five employees and was operating on a very lean business model, Smith said. It had only $21 million in assets, barely more than the value of its assets in 1927.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

“Our perspective was we have the insurance expertise, we have capital, we have relationships and … can essentially turn around the trajectory that it was on and sort of try to give it another century of sort of performance to add to the 120 years it already has,” Smith said.

In January 2023, Atlanta Life Insurance Co. was acquired for an undisclosed sum by Atlanta Life Holdings, a holding company owned by a group of Black entrepreneurs and executives, including Johnson. He is a beneficial owner of Atlanta Life, and the nonprofit Herndon Foundation is a minority equity owner. Smith is now executive vice president of Atlanta Life.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Though Atlanta Life is a shadow of the institution it once was, it has fared better than its peers. North Carolina Mutual, once one of the most successful Black-owned companies in the country, entered into receivership in 2018, which is similar to bankruptcy, and is being liquidated. Some of its employees have been hired by Atlanta Life, according to Smith.

“As the new torchbearer of these pioneering institutions, I’m committed to build upon their combined legacies of creating economic opportunities and security for our community while preserving the spirit of exceptional service and empowerment that has defined these companies for over a century,” Johnson said in an email.

Atlanta Life now has about $400 million in assets and is hoping to start selling insurance directly to consumers by the end of year, after only being in the employee group benefits industry for years.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

But for Antoinin, the Atlanta Life that she devoted 46 years to is gone, and she misses it.

“Atlanta Life brought culture. It brought integrity,” Antoinin said. “Atlanta Life brought an appreciation of who we were as Black people.”

This year marks 120 years since Herndon founded Atlanta Life. For many of those years, the company soared. Then it tumbled, nearly extinct. What it will be remains to be seen. But because it existed, Atlanta will never be the same.

ABOUT THIS SERIES

This year’s AJC Black History Month series, marking its 10th year, focuses on the role African Americans played in building Atlanta and the overwhelming influence that has had on American culture. These daily offerings appear throughout February in the paper and on AJC.com and AJC.com/news/atlanta-black-history.

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