How the Black aristocracy of the Gilded Age ushered in a new era of education and freedom

One main storyline in “The Gilded Age” follows Peggy Scott (played by Denée Benton), an author, journalist, and daughter of a formerly enslaved man, Arthur Scott, who is a successful pharmacist and business owner in Brooklyn. Her mother, Dorothy Scott, is an accomplished piano player.

Peggy’s character was inspired by a few real-life women, including Julia C. Collins, the first Black female author to publish a novel.

“The Black elite of the Gilded Age signaled that we, too, have taste. We too have education. We are like other citizens,” Carla Peterson, historian and author of “Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City,” told Business Insider.

The new class was made up of Black Americans who managed to amass wealth they’d previously been barred from.

Industrialization and the railroad boom opened up business opportunities across the US. Many of the Black elite were made up of the “shopkeeping aristocracy” who owned retail and grocery stores and pharmacies, according to Peterson.

“After the Civil War, there was an incredible explosion of modern industry, technology, and science, which fueled the money that makes the Gilded Age,” Peterson said. “Black families of wealth emerged in this context.”

Thomas Downing, the son of formerly enslaved parents, moved to New York City and became a savvy businessman who popularized oysters, which had once been considered common food.

In 1825, he opened the upscale Thomas Downing Oyster House, a restaurant so popular that Downing was nicknamed “the “New York Oyster King.”

Downing was one of the wealthiest people in New York City at the time of his death in 1866 — a millionaire in today’s money, per The Virginian-Pilot. Still, he was prohibited from acquiring US citizenship until the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was passed, just one day before he died.

Toussaint was born into slavery in Haiti and was eventually freed in New York City. He became a highly sought-after hairdresser among the society’s upper crust, and used his new wealth to support orphans and immigrants to gain education and employment.

Mary Ellen Pleasant became a self-made millionaire after she moved to San Francisco, following the glimmer of the California Gold Rush. While she worked as domestic help, she listened to the wealthy men she served as they exchanged information on making proper investments and managing money.

Pleasant used that knowledge to buy up boarding houses, laundromats, restaurants, and Wells Fargo shares, becoming a famous figure in San Francisco in the second half of the 19th century.

Some estimates by historians put her wealth around $30 million, which would be almost a billion in today’s money.

Money alone didn’t grant access to the upper echelons of Black society. In addition to having “character” and “respectability,” the Black elite emphasized both education and hard work as core values, according to Peterson.

“Since Blacks came to this country, education has always been number one,” Peterson told Business Insider. “There is a belief that if you had ambition, you could do anything you wanted. And ambition started with education.”

On February 25, 1837, Quaker philanthropist Richard Humphreys founded the first HBCU in the country, the African Institute — now Cheyney University — in Pennsylvania. The majority of HBCUs originated from 1865 to 1900, the period following the Emancipation Proclamation.

Education was key to unlocking the skills to become a doctor or pharmacist, and also led to a flourishing of interests in humanities and the arts, according to Peterson. Scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois advocated for the need for an educated class.

“The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men,” Du Bois wrote in his essay, ‘Talented Tenth.”

Not everyone lived lavish lifestyles. The Gilded Age was also notorious for having the most significant wealth inequality in American history. The vast majority of workers, especially Black Americans and immigrants, faced extreme poverty and harsh working conditions in factories.

“Chattel slavery is dead, but industrial slavery remains,” economist and New York mayoral candidate Henry George said in 1886.

Even those who did manage to gain wealth faced pervasive systemic inequities. White society largely viewed Black Americans as “a homogenous mass of degraded people,” according to historian Willard B. Gatewood in his book, “Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite.”

“Even exceptional Blacks were considered inferior to whites,” Gatewood wrote.

Peterson described how professional relationships enabled Black Americans to climb the ranks within businesses. She also pointed to the King’s Daughters, a nationwide charity organization where white and Black women worked together to help those in need.

Friendships between characters like Peggy and Marian, a white woman, in “The Gilded Age” were not unheard of.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a professor of history at Rutgers University, told The Los Angeles Times about “the letters of white suffragists, women who had deep relationships with Black women, from the era of abolition up through the early 20th century.”

Peterson said the emergence of the Black elite is inextricably tied to the burgeoning political and social activism in the 20th century, as exemplified by the 1909 founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the political magazine The Crisis, and the Harlem Renaissance.

“None of this could have happened without having had the 19th century Black elite,” Peterson said.