Ernesta G. Procope

Ernesta G. Procope is the founder, president and CEO of E.G. Bowman Co., the first minority-owned company on Wall Street and the largest minority-owned insurance brokerage company in the United States.

Ernesta Procope was born in 1931 to West Indian Immigrant parents Clarence and Elvira Lord Foster. She showed promise as a piano prodigy and played a recital at Carnegie Hall at the age of 12. Although she attended New York’s prestigious High School of Music and Art. her interests ultimately shifted toward real estate and insurance.

When she married real estate broker Albin Bowman in the late 1940′s, he was looking for a way to insure his holdings. Insurance companies were reluctant to insure homes in poor, African-American neighborhoods. With her husband’s encouragement,

Sade.

Artistically, I have high aspirations. I don’t want to  do anything less than the best I can do

Her middle name, Folasade, means “honor confers your crown”. She is Britain’s most successful solo female artist.  She has sold over 50 million albums in her 27 year career. More than half of them were sold after 1990, when she had scaled back considerably on her singing and press engagements.

Sade (Helen Folasade Adu) was born January 16, 1959 in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. Her father was a professor of economics and her mother was a nurse. They met in London and moved to Nigeria after they married. Toward the end of the marriage, Sade and her mother moved back to England. She grew up there and studied fashion at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

Barbara Gardner Proctor

Advertising is the single most important way of reaching everyone in America and I feel a deep responsibility for my work.

When Barbara Gardner Proctor launched her advertising agency (Proctor & Gardner, the first one of national and international scope to be owned by an African American woman and the second largest black owned advertising agency in the country), she was initially denied a small business loan because of a lack of collateral. Undaunted, Proctor obtained three advertising agencies’ statements of what they would pay her as an employee and convinved the lender to give her an $80,000 loan using herself as collateral. She also purposefully named the business both Proctor and Gardner so that potential clients would assume that “Gardner” was a male partner behind the scenes.