Who were the wealthiest African-Americans in the mid to late 1800s?

I read a fascinating book that is only slightly at a tangent to this question - The Other Brahmins - Boston's Black Upper Class from 1750 to 1950 by Dr. Adelaide Cromwell, link

Brahmins is essentially the author's doctoral dissertation, written in the 1940s, then reworked and published 5 decades later into a book. It is a sharp departure from the usual narrative of Black history written by largely white authors for the largely white audience of the History Channel. The methodology and style are very academic and thorough, in a good way.

It does not name names which would address your question directly, but it does show, in broad terms, what life was like for the Black well-to-do.

Here are some spoilers -

(1) Boston is somewhat a special case, sociologically. It was never as industrialized as other cities, didn't grow as much, and so an older Black establishment was less swamped by waves of poor, desperate migrants from the South.

(2) Black people and the Irish were jostling each other to get up the ladder of 'society.' Put more cynically, Black people could look down on certain Irish.

(3) The Black middle and upper class was mostly entrepeneurs in the 1940's. White Bostonians would be less racist than in other areas, and in one example, would think nothing of buying their furniture from the Black owned furniture store who had quite a few White staff.

(4) Your status in Black society is based much more on your family, heritage, etc. than actual wealth, compared to White culture. One typical elite couple is described, with photos, at their daughter's debutant coming-out party. This 50-something couple were described as being descended from Revolutionary War veterans and being in Boston since the 1750s, all the prerequisites to being a 'Brahmin', then at the bottom of the description, it mentions what they do for a living - the husband is a post office manager and the wife was a pharmacist. Materially, by 'White' standards - that's solidly middle class, but by the Black rules of a century ago, their history is weighed much more heavily than money itself. While individual families were wealthy, there was not Black leisure class in any city in the US at all.

I couldn't say how much money he had on hand, but Frederick Douglass was certainly doing doing well for himself. Perhaps the most famous, if not the richest, then, but after all not being a slave or a tenant farmer was quite an achievement by itself.

After the turn of the century, however, we have Madam C.J. Walker, who is credited as being both the first African-American, and first female, self-made millionaire, through her beauty product company.

Booker T. Washington, unsurprisingly, wrote about several wealthy African-Americans in his The Story of the Negro, particularly the "The Negro Disfranchisement and the Negro in Business" chapter. Some of the men mentioned (and they're all men) were simply successful businessmen, but there were a few notably well-off individuals.

Washington published in 1909, so some of the cases are a bit outside your time frame or at the tail end of it. For instance, there was James C. Thomas, "the richest man of African descent in New York" who had "one of the largest businesses of any undertaker, white or black, in the city of New York." Also H. K. Rischer who "had for nearly twenty years... a practical monopoly of the bakery business." He business reportedly earned $30K a year and employed a dozen people. Both got their start in the early 1880s. Another Jacksonian (Jacksonite?) was L. K. Attwood, a lawyer who held various political offices during the 1870s before moving on the be a successful landowner and entrepreneur.

Booker T. does explicitly states that "no coloured man has ever been classed among the millionaires, though several men have had the reputation of being in that class." He specifically cites [Col. John McKee](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McKee_(Colonel) as a member of that rarefied group, as well as Thomy Lafon. It should be noted that, unlike the others mentioned so far, both of these men were born free (if poor) and would be consider mixed-race today, which gave them an advantage both in time and acceptance over their darker-skinned compatriots who were born in bondage.

My personal favorite slavery to luxury story is actually that of Biddy Mason who was born a slave in the Deep South in 1818, then gradually moved West with her Mormon owner, eventually ending up in California in 1851. California being a free state, she managed -- with some help -- to successfully sue her way out of slavery, becoming a successful and frugal nurse and midwife in LA. So frugal in fact, that she was able to start buying and selling real estate, eventually amassing a sizeable fortune and reputation for philanthropy before her death in 1891.

Final note, if you're willing to expand your time period into the late 19th/early 20th Centuries, you'll start running into the "Sweet Auburn" period, when that Atlanta neighborhood was one of, if not the most, successful Black communities in the country. You get names like Henry A. Rucker, Alonzo Herndon, Herman E. Perry, and Charles Moseley, who were founders/owners of several key business ranging from insurance companies, banks, to newspapers. There's a book from 1894 called The black side : a partial history of the business, religious, and educational side of the Negro in Atlanta, Ga. which is equal parts fascinating and dull in its painstakingly account of the Black social and economic community of the time.

black masters deals with a very wealth black planter family in antebellum south Carolina.