Mary Ellen Pleasant

By most accounts, Mary Ellen Pleasant was born into slavery in the early nineteenth century. She became an abolitionist and millionaire. Other facts are less clear. The mystery was likely purposeful, given that she was an abolitionist African American woman who used information gleaned as a servant to attain wealth.

After Pleasant arrived in Gold Rush San Francisco, she became a cook for the elite. She invested her earnings in boardinghouses, dairies, and mines.

Almost a century before the Montgomery bus boycotts in Alabama, she successfully sued to desegregate San Francisco’s streetcars. The black community saw her as their champion.