Samuel B. Fuller
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Samuel B. Fuller (S.B. Fuller) (June 4, 1905 —- October 24, 1988) was an African American entrepreneur. He was founder and president of the Fuller Products Company, publisher of the New York Age and Pittsburgh Courier, head the South Side Chicago NAACP, president of the National Negro Business League, and a prominent black Republican.
S.B. Fuller's life was an illustration of business success and self-help. His company gave inspiration and training to countless aspiring entrepreneurs and future leaders, including John H. Johnson and T.R.M. Howard.
Fuller was born into rural poverty in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana in 1905. From an early age, he gained a reputation for reliability and resourcefulness. After coming to Chicago in 1920, he worked in a wide range of menial jobs, eventually rising up to become manager of a coal yard. Although he had a secure job during the depression, he struck out on his own preferring “freedom” to “security.” Starting with twenty-five dollars, he founded Fuller Products in 1934.
The company manufactured and sold such diverse commodities as deodorant, hair care, hosiery, and men’s suits. Fuller also published several newspapers including the New York Age and the Pittsburgh Courier.
Fuller was a leading black Republican although he always had an independent streak. He promoted civil rights and briefly headed the Chicago South Side NAACP. Along with black Birmingham businessman, A.G. Gaston, he tried to organize a cooperative effort to purchase the segregated bus company during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He told Martin Luther King Jr., “The bus company is losing money and willing to sell. We should buy it.” King was skeptical of the idea, and not enough blacks came forward to raise the money.
Despite his belief in civil rights, however, Fuller’s emphasis was always on the need for blacks to go into business. In 1958, he blasted the federal government for undermining free enterprise and fostering socialism. He feared that it was “doing the same thing today as was done in the days of Caesar--destroying incentive and initiative.” He argued that wherever “there is capitalism there is freedom.”
By the 1950s, he was probably the richest black man in the United States. His cosmetics company had $18 million in sales and a sales force of five thousand (one third of them white). It gave training to many future entrepreneurs and other leaders. “It doesn’t make any difference,” he declared, “about the color of an individual’s skin. No one cares whether a cow is black, red, yellow, or brown. They want to know how much milk it can produce.”
Fuller was a good friend and associate of Dr. T.R.M. Howard from Mississippi and later Chicago. Howard was a wealthy black entrepreneur and a prominent civil rights leader and mentor to Medgar Evers. Fuller and Howard had probably met because of their mutual involvement in the National Negro Business League. Fuller was president of the organization for several terms in the 1940s and 1950s.
Fuller hired Howard to be medical director of Fuller Products and supported his Republican campaign for Congress in 1958.
Fuller Products Company suffered severe reverses after a controversial speech to the National Association of Manufacturers in 1963 in which charged that too many blacks were using their lack of civil rights as an excuse for failure. Many of his comments were reported out of context. Major national black leaders reacted angrily and called for a boycott of Fuller Products.
Racists in the South piled on by putting pressure on whites to boycott his products or quit selling for him. Although Fuller Products filed for bankruptcy in 1969, he concentrated with some success on the hard task of rebuilding the company during the 1970s and 1980s. He died in 1988.
Fuller Products Company is now owned by Dudley Products, Inc.
[edit] References
- Mary Fuller Casey, S.B. Fuller: Pioneer in Black Economic Development (Jamestown, N.C.: Bridgemaster Press, 2003).
- David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, T.R.M. Howard: Pragmatism over Strict Integrationist Ideology in the Mississippi Delta, 1942-1954 in Glenn Feldman, ed., Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South (2004 book), 68-95.
- David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito. T.R.M. Howard M.D.: A Mississippi Doctor in Chicago Civil Rights, A.M.E. Church Review (July-September 2001), 50-59.
