Published: 28 January 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
IN 1840 OR 1841, a wedding in New Orleans was abruptly cancelled. The bridegroom, admitting that his parents weren’t married and that his mother was black, fled on a ship bound for the West. His well-heeled bride-to-be died soon after this, some believe of shock.
That ashamed groom, who was not allowed to marry his betrothed, never wed but went on to become America’s first black millionaire and a founding father of the city of San Francisco.
William Alexander Leidesdorff Jr was born October 23, 1810, on the island of St Croix in the Danish West Indies. Gary Palgon’s 2005 book William Alexander Leidesdorff: First Black Millionaire, American Consul and California Pioneer, reports that his father, William Leidesdorff, was a Jewish Danish seaman and sugar planter and that his mother, Anna Marie Sparks, was a plantation worker of Creole descent.
Leidesdorff Sr, who was not married to Sparks, did not appear to have had a hand in raising his son, but Leidesdorff fils found an early patron in an English foster father who groomed him to take over his family plantation and shipping business. He passed as the Englishman’s son and was told never to reveal that his mother was black.
“I believe that he was a very light-skinned individual,” Palgon, who is a Leidesdorff relative, said in a phone interview with the Forward.
“A lot of my read is many of the people that he dealt with probably didn’t know that he was Jewish and that he had a black mother. I think those were things that benefited him to be successful as an individual throughout his life.”
FULL STORY The peculiar saga of the black Jew who founded San Francisco (Forward)
