GOOD MORNING P.O.U.!
We continue our look at African-American Real Estate Moguls with…..
Sidney P. Dones
(1888-1947)
Born in Marshall, Texas in 1888, Dones graduated from his hometown’s Wiley College before moving to Los Angeles in 1905. The following year, he moved back to Texas — this time to El Paso, where he made an unsuccessfull attempt to establish a colored colony in Mexicao. Returning to California, he prospered in the classic Los Angeles manner: by buying and selling real estate. He also became a money lender, an insurance agent, a music dealer, and ultimately, a filmmaker and actor. Dones was an entrepreneurial engine running full throttle without a governor. His primary clientele was African American, but the Eagle noted that his success stemmed from his ability to “win the confidence and respect of the better class whites of this section.” If so, he was doubly beautiful for the Negro Business League set, for he fueled the group economy and turned the tables on white businesses that made money off blacks. “Dones has won the title of Los Angeles’ most popular young businessman,” the New Age noted in 1915. “[He] is enjoying the greatest real estate and insurance business of any race man in the West.”
When W.E.B. Du Bois visited Los Angeles in 1913 he was struck by the Race enterprises and the entrepreneurial mind-set of their owners. In the Crisis he trumpeted the “snap and ambition” of the city’s “new blood.” Dones had the most snap, and he was largely responsible for solidifying black enterprise on Central Avenue. He began in 1914, when he organized the Sidney P. Dones Company and set up shop at 8th and Central, next door to the Eagle. The company dealt mainly in real estate but also offered insurance and legal services, courtesy of the black attorney C.A. Jones. The Basses boosted Dones’s business —“Owned and Conducted by Race Men” — and devoted an entire front page to the enterprise.
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Something approximating an official birth of the Central Avenue business district occurred in early 1916, when Sidney Dones opened the Booker T. Washington Building at 10th Street and Central Avenue. Two blocks south of the Eagle’s office, the Washington Building was a handsome three-story affair, with shops on the sidewalk level and offices and apartments above that. Joe Bass called it the “Largest and Best Appointed Edifice on Central Avenue” and added that it was “Procured for Colored Business Men.” The headline boomed: “Central Avenue Assumes Gigantic Proportion as Business Section For Colored Men.”
(SOURCE: Flamming, Douglas. “Claiming Central Avenue.” Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 121-22. Print.)