From Rags to Riches: The Story of Alonzo Herndon | Georgia Stories

On this episode of Georgia Stories; Alonzo Herndon, a former slave born in 1858 in Social Circle, sought to better himself and ultimately became Atlanta's first African-American millionaire. An entrepreneur at heart, he learned barbering and eventually opened his own shop in Atlanta called the Crystal Palace and later founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. Historian Marcellus Barksdale describes the Crystal Palace as fitting its name. Carole Merritt, director of Herndon Home, takes students on a tour of the house where Alonzo Herndon lived with his wife Adrienne and their son Norris.
Original Air Date: 03/12/1994
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[@abrahamisaacmuciusiii9192]

Alonzo Herndon was an American Quadroon. His father was a US born White man of English European origin. Alonzo's mother was an American Mulatto woman of English European and African American descent. Alonzo Herndon's first wife Adrienne McNeil Herndon was also a Quadroon.

[@vrj40]

Herndon's father was white and the one drop rule was created by the US federal government, not the black community. And in states like North Carolina a large segment of black Americans resemble Herndon.

[@jayyoung4534]

"black"? Funny how people see things differently. For example, I see someone of mixed heritage. Somewhere along the line there was a blending of African and "some other," more than likely "white." So how is it, among both "black" and "white" Americans, this "one drop equals "black" fiction, established in a slave/plantation context, remain so well respected, especially in a time when a man with movie star good looks, who bedded three A Hollywood listers, sired a tribe of children, can now be seen as a woman? Isn't it rather puzzling, looking at photos of a man of manifest mixed heritage, be called "black"?

[@madreep]

He was born a slave. Mixed race didn't matter back then, nor does it now