Overlooked No More: Elizabeth A. Gloucester, ‘Richest’ Black Woman and Ally of John BrownPosted in Articles, Biography, History, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2022-01-11 18:12Z by Steven |
Overlooked No More: Elizabeth A. Gloucester, ‘Richest’ Black Woman and Ally of John Brown
The New York Times
2019-09-18
Steve Bell, Senior Staff Editor
Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
She ran boardinghouses whose lodgers included members of New York’s elite, raised money for an orphan asylum and was active in the abolitionists’ cause.
With a fortune built largely from operating boarding homes in Brooklyn and beyond, Elizabeth A. Gloucester was considered by many to be the richest black woman in America at her death at age 66 on Aug. 9, 1883.
Attending her funeral was “a congregation of people such as has seldom come together,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, made up of “richly dressed white ladies, fashionably attired gentlemen and a number of well-known colored people.”
Whether her fortune of about $300,000 (the equivalent of about $7 million today) actually made her the nation’s wealthiest black woman may be impossible to prove. Some white women were much richer; the financial whiz Hetty Green was then building a net worth that might rival or exceed that held by President Trump today.
But Gloucester was notable for more than just her money. She was linked — for a time dangerously so — to the antislavery firebrand John Brown, whom some blamed for leading the nation into the Civil War. She also led efforts to raise money for New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum, which would be set afire in the deadly draft riots of 1863. In her final year she even managed to land a cameo role in a high-society scandal that made headlines across the country…
Read the entire article here.