Herman Russell represented possibility in Atlanta. When the city’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, was negotiating in the 1970s to build what would become Atlanta Jackson-Hartsfield airport, he insisted on an unheard-of 30% minority participation on contracts. He also demanded that banks and law firms working on the project have Black people leading their teams, recalled Reuben McDaniel III, then a young banker and later chief executive officer of a securities firm the mayor opened.
“Herman is a great example of how this benefited Black businesses, because this was his first big public infrastructure project,” said McDaniel, who is now chief executive officer of New York’s Dormitory Authority. “It just changed the narrative on how Black owners built their business financially, because they made a lot of money on these projects, and it also changed the narrative on how they built their client base.”
More than 2 million African-Americans now live in greater metro Atlanta, and there are more than 7,600 Black-owned businesses, according to U.S. Census data. Only New York City area has more.
In Atlanta’s Castleberry Hill, an arts district whose lofts and lounges are popular with young Black professionals, the Russell company’s past and future can be found. A giant mural of Herman Russell looms over a major intersection, and the company’s former 54,000-square-foot headquarters has been transformed into the Russell Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a business incubator whose mission is to provide young people with resources “to innovate, grow, create jobs and build wealth.”
“For my father, it was always about how could he develop a protocol or a system where the wealth in the family could be perpetuated?” said Michael Russell Sr., chief executive officer since 2003.
Herman Russell’s father, Rogers Russell, left his large family $12,000 when he died in 1959, according to Russell’s autobiography, “Building Atlanta.” More than the sum , which at the time wasn’t bad for a Black laborer, he taught his son a trade and instilled a work ethic. Herman Russell was notoriously frugal—he drove his wife to society cocktail parties in an old pickup—and he ensured the money stayed in the family. His made sure that his offspring attended private banking and estate planning conferences for the wealthy.
“He understood that we needed to be exposed to a lot more than he could teach us alone,” said Ross. “People share stores of mistakes they have made and there’s an understanding that it is very difficult to go from a first generation to a second generation, but even harder to go to all of the subsequent generations.”
In years of attending such meetings she saw just one other Black family.
Michael Russell Jr., 27, who currently works in New York for the National Basketball Association, said that as a child, every Tuesday night he and his cousins and their parents would join Herman Russell for dinner at his Midtown condo. It was the patriarch’s way of nurturing closeness and avoiding what happens to so many family businesses—as the family tree expands, relationships fracture and business interests and financial priorities diverge. “That Tuesday night dinner was a regular occasion for us to really get to know each other,” said Michael Jr.
Herman Russell never took his wealth for granted, even after he had a personal net worth that Black Enterprise estimated to be as high as $100 million.
In a 2020 documentary, one of Herman Russell’s former employees, Noel Khalil, recalled walking alongside Russell, by then worth many millions. “He saw a penny on the floor,” Khali said. “He went and picked up the penny and looked at me and said, ‘Noel, see how God has blessed me today.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.