A.G. Gaston ranks high among modern Alabama’s most successful businessmen.
Born in the late 19th century, he overcame poverty and racial discrimination during his long climb to success in Birmingham, where he lived after 1905. Gaston’s $40 million business empire spread over the fields of finance, construction, hospitality, communication, education and insurance.
For a short time in 1940s Birmingham, he presided over a small bottling company, owned and operated by African Americans. In those few up-and-down years, the entrepreneur learned important, hard lessons in the soft drink business.
Gaston had pursued a bottling business for several years. Having seen the successes of African American bottlers in other cities, he felt Birmingham could sustain such a venture.
“Even when allowances were made for maximum overhead expenses,” Gaston wrote in his memoir, “it appeared to me that the profits were enormous and fast.”
He secured franchise and trademark rights to make and distribute Brown Belle, a line of soft drinks marketed to Black clientele.
The company organized in November 1940 with Gaston as head. Early associates included Robert L. Williams, who was proprietor of the popular Little Savoy Café; steakhouse owner Alvey Alexander; event promoter B. F. Cammack; and attorney Arthur D. Shores. A. G. Gaston Jr., the business titan’s namesake, served as manager of the company’s 15 employees.
None of the individuals involved with Brown Belle’s launch had prior experience in the bottling or distribution business. What they had in abundance, however, was well-founded confidence in A. G. Gaston himself.
Gaston also had a silent partner: James Lee Sr., chief executive of Buffalo Rock, the Magic City’s bottling behemoth. Quietly, Lee installed bottling equipment at Gaston’s 4th Avenue facility in exchange for a profit share. It was a risky endeavor, considering the rigid color line of the era. Neither of the businessmen spoke publicly of their arrangement, which only came to light in 2010.
When it launched in January 1940, the Brown Belle Bottling Co. produced several varieties, including Brown Belle Boogie, ginger ale and “true fruit flavors” like grape, lemon, orange, peach and strawberry.
With an eye toward community uplift, the company donated a percentage of its profits to local charities. “Every time you drink a bottle of Brown Belle you will satisfy your thirst, tickle your palate and ease your conscience,” read an advertisement. After the U.S. entered World War II, Brown Belle contributed to area war bond drives.
Demand was high. More than 1 million bottles were sold in the first 10 months. Profits for the first year were a reported $100,000 (about $2.3 million today.) By 1943, more than 4 million bottles had been sold. The company outgrew its location and moved to a renovated two-story brick building on the corner of 3rd Avenue and 14th Street. Brown Belle also secured a retail establishment, winning a bid to build and operate a concession stand at Tuxedo Park, a municipal entertainment venue for African Americans.
In October 1946, Gaston traveled to Washington, D.C., to address the annual Conference on the Negro in Business. He urged the young attendees to “go into a new business, not the regular, run-of-the-mill business.”
There was reason to heed his words. In just six years, his startup soft drink gamble had sold 10 million bottles and weathered public challenges. Earlier in the year, Arthur Shores, noted Birmingham attorney and an original Brown Belle officer, fended off a trademark dispute against Gaston in federal court.
Despite the confidence espoused by its founder, problems bubbled just below the surface. Burglars stole a safe from the Brown Belle headquarters containing $500 and important business records. It was a blow, to be sure, but not a fatal one. Employee maleficence was a greater, more costly malady. Gaston discovered some of his staff were involved in schemes to offload the company’s sugar and syrup to bootleggers.
Brown Belle also experienced increased industry competition after World War II, including one challenge from another, albeit unlikely, Alabamian: heavyweight boxing champ Joe Louis. New York’s William P. Graham, president of the All-American Drinks Corp., partnered with the Chambers County native to market the eponymous soft drink called Joe Louis Punch. The boxer’s name alone helped secure dozens of franchise opportunities throughout the country. But when Graham came calling for a partnership with Brown Belle, Gaston refused him, perhaps still leery from his recent trademark dispute. By 1947, the upstart Joe Louis Bottling Co. of Birmingham was selling crates of the new soda, “the bottle of the century,” from its own headquarters on North 26th Street, a few blocks away from Brown Belle.
It is unlikely that Joe Louis knew anything of the dispute. Throughout the short-lived enterprise, he showed little interest in the product that bore his name. Once, when asked by a radio host to name his favorite beverage, the champ quickly replied “Coca-Cola!”
Still, rising pressures and fizzling profits left Gaston, in his own words, “exhausted, embarrassed and no little ashamed.”
He candidly concluded that he had entered the business for the wrong reasons. “I turned…to the idea of filling my pockets…. After all the accounts were in, I found that I had lost about $60,000 trying to get rich quick.”
Gaston absorbed the company’s debts himself to save face with the community and his investors. In his memoir, he called the venture a “complete fiasco.” In this fact, Gaston and his biographers agree. The Brown Belle Bottling Co. was one of his only true business failures. Before it, and after, were years of successes.
“Failure is not fatal,” Winston Churchill once said. “It is the courage to continue that counts.”
When he shuttered Brown Belle, Gaston’s greatest years as a businessman and engaged citizen were ahead of him, including his crucial support of the Civil Rights Movement and the fostering of minority-owned businesses. In these efforts he continued well into advanced years, before his death in 1996 at the age of 103. Thus, for a half-century after Brown Belle, Gaston had the chance, and the courage, to continue.
Historian Scotty E. Kirkland is a freelance contributor to Business Alabama. He lives in Wetumpka.
This article appears in the February 2025 issue of Business Alabama.
