8/18/2023 0 Comments Icons highlight ig black meWoodfin says Gaston was vital to Black Birmingham's progress. He has a personal connection – as a child Woodfin played on the peewee football team for the AG Gaston Boy's Club. I call him a civil rights icon," says Malone.īirmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin says the city is working to honor Gaston's contributions. Gaston's descendants are glad to see the AG Gaston Motel restored after so many years, and are now pushing to have a Birmingham street named after him. It was one of his favorite activities, and where he could clear his mind, she says. She has fond memories of fishing trips with her great-grandfather. "He was about providing the yes in order to invest in a future of people that had not even been born yet." Rochelle Malone sees her great grandfather as revolutionary. And he wanted other Black people to see that they could make it too." "He was a fighter and he was determined and he made it. The odds were terribly against him," Gardner says with admiration. "I cannot even imagine what he went through trying to be in business. He says it's remarkable what his uncle achieved given the hostile climate in the Deep South when he was starting out in the 1920s. Gardner, 69, has fond memories of going to his uncle's house as a child to swim in the backyard pool. Washington, who he considered a role model. He clicks off the list of businesses that followed, including an insurance company, cemeteries, a bank, a pharmacy, a bottling company, a construction firm, a business college, a nursing home, and radio stations. "The funeral home was the basis of his empire," says funeral home director Paul Gardner, one of Gaston's nephews. Paul Gardner, director of the Smith and Gaston Funeral Home and AG Gaston's nephew, says that his uncle's legacy resonates in the Black community today.
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