THE BLACK BANKER WHO OVERCAME RACISM

Had Bernard Garrett, a black millionaire, been born white, he might have been as rich as Warren Buffett. He certainly had the smarts.

Born in Willis, a small town in Texas, in 1925, Garrett rose about as high as a black man could in that region in that era. He ran a cleaning business, but that wasn't enough. Garrett moved his family to California, then as now seen as the land of golden opportunity, in 1945, again starting out in the cleaning business but soon branching out into real estate, buying apartment buildings for blacks with the profits of the business and a rare white banker who loaned him money to purchase the building.

By 1954, Garrett, now a millionaire, was ready for his biggest investment: Los Angeles' Bankers Building, the city's tallest, which he purchased with the use of a straw buyer, someone white who pretended to be the front man, while the real owners, Garrett and his partner, Joseph B. Morris, pretended to be the janitors, as selling to blacks was frowned upon at the time. It would be a tactic Garrett would continue to use when he entered the banking business in his native Texas.

“I had a desire to return to Houston, Texas, the place of my birth to give relief to local colored people who were having great difficulty obtaining real estate loans,” he once said.

Beginning in 1963, Garrett, again using whites as front men, bought two savings and loan institutions, Main Land Bank & Trust Co. in Texas City, and First National Bank of Marlin. The banks were instrumental in providing often life-saving loans to African Americans squeezed out of the borrowing market by white banks due to their race.

Garrett was in the process of creating an even bigger banking and real estate empire when he ran into legal roadblocks put in place by powerful politicians, including Sen. John McClellan (D-Ark.), a Southern segregationist. Convicted in 1965 of misapplying $189,000 in bank funds, Garrett served nine months of a three-year sentence.

The banking and real estate pioneer tried to put together other big deals, including the formation of a bank in The Bahamas; however, with a criminal conviction on his record, he was unable to obtain a charter. He died in Los Angeles in 1999, nearly forgotten until he was rediscovered decades later by black capitalists seeking to follow in his footsteps.