Announcing the Inaugural Christiana Carteaux Bannister Awards rimonthly.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from rimonthly.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
50 Companies Founded by Black Entrepreneurs
By Peter Richman, Stacker News
On 2/26/21 at 8:00 PM EST
The entrepreneurial spirit is a cornerstone of American culture, but history books too often leave out the extensive contributions of minorities and women. In honor of Black History Month, Stacker is shining a light on 50 Black entrepreneurs who made a lasting influence on the business world and, often in the process, civil rights from the Revolutionary War to today.
The abrupt end to slavery in 1865 following the conclusion of the Civil War freed about 4 million people but left them without a clear trajectory forward. Black Codes afforded freed people the right to sue in court and marry but stipulated other discriminatory rules like keeping them from serving on juries or in state militias.
Snapshot: Christiana Carteaux Bannister
February 24, 2021
The wind on her vestment says it all: Christiana Carteaux Bannister was a woman with agency. Momentum. “A spark,” says Massachusetts-based sculptor Pablo Eduardo, who was commissioned by the Rhode Island Foundation to create this bust for the State House in 2002. Christiana, born in 1819 to a Black and Indigenous family in North Kingstown, was an entrepreneur who grew her wealth as a hair doctress in Boston. There, she met a young out-of-work painter named Edward Mitchell Bannister. She took him on at her salon, housed him, married him and supported him. Eventually, the pair moved to Providence, where Edward’s art career flourished in the face of Reconstruction-era racism. Christiana opened another salon and devoted her spare time to activism and philanthropy. In 1890, she helped found the Home for Aged Colored Women, a place where retired domestic servants could live out their final days in peace. In 1902, a widowed a