The original headquarters of one of the most successful African-American-owned businesses west of the Mississippi, and an anchor of the Black community around Central Avenue.

I’m celebrating Black History Month throughout February by visiting sites important to the history of Black Angelenos.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 26, 1998

There’s an auto insurance company called United Acceptance at 4259 Central Avenue in South LA. It’s one of the many small businesses on this stretch of Central Avenue that serves the largely Hispanic and Black communities that live nearby. I consider it a little wink from the cosmos that just one door south is the building that once housed another insurance broker, Golden State Mutual – the first African-American-owned insurance company west of the Mississippi, and one of the most successful Black-owned businesses of its era. 

The Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company (GSM) was founded in 1925, at a time when most life insurance brokers in California considered African-Americans too risky to insure. GSM’s co-founder William Nickerson, Jr. had recently moved to LA from Texas to start up a branch of the American Mutual Benefit Association. He was outraged by the idea that LA could be home to one of the largest populations of Blacks in the country (second only to Baltimore at the time), and yet because of blatant racism, Blacks were either charged ridiculously high premiums or denied coverage outright.

When American Mutual decided not to renew his contract, Nickerson hired business associates Norman O. Houston and George A. Beavers, Jr. to join a new venture aimed at getting African Americans insured. Both of them had worked with him at American Mutual. The story of all the legal and financial hoops that Nickerson had to jump through to get the company off the ground is worthy of its own post. Suffice it to say, he taught himself enough about insurance law that he was able to find a loophole that let him start his own company without a prohibitive amount of startup costs.

In July of 1925, the company started working out of a small office at 1435 Central Avenue (see a picture here). Within three months they outgrew the office and moved to a storeroom further north on Central; by 1928, they had over 100 employees, and branches throughout California. It was time to build their first headquarters.

To design it, GSM hired James H. Garrott, the second Black man to become licensed as an architect in California (the first was Paul R. Williams, designer of the Second Baptist Church – see visit #69). Garrott had no formal training, but had learned a lot about the design and construction of buildings from his father, who was a builder in Alabama. The GSM building was one of Garrott’s first commissions after getting his license. He brought onboard an African-American contractor named Louis Blodgett to build it. 

Garrott designed the building’s facade in straightforward Spanish colonial revival style, with the classic red terracotta tiles on the roof, beige stucco exterior, arched entryway and ornamental carvings above the main door and on the second floor frieze (You might describe those carvings as “churrigueresque;” I certainly would, because goddamn do I love saying that word). While nobody’s going to call this an architectural masterpiece, its elegant facade certainly stands out on Central Avenue today; and despite some re-partitioning of the storefronts on the bottom floor, that facade looks much like it did when GSM opened. 

Golden State Mutual operated out of the second floor of this building for some 20 years, leasing out the bottom floors to various local businesses. In 1949 they moved yet again, this time into a magnificent late moderne palace designed by Paul R. Williams at 1999 West Adams Blvd, a historic building in its own right. Beginning in the mid-’60s, the company started to amass one of the country’s largest collections of art by African Americans, much of which was displayed at its headquarters. By the 1980s, GSM was struggling financially; after years of operating losses, their policies were taken over by IA American Life Insurance Company and GSM went defunct. 

The NRHP nomination form references a 1933 LA Times article that described Golden State Mutual as one of only two businesses on Central Avenue that “really counts.” That was well-intentioned hyperbole. Central Avenue was bustling back then with important hotspots, including the Dunbar Hotel just one block north, as swinging a gathering place for musicians as you could find anywhere in the country. 

But it’s hard to overstate the importance of what was happening on the second floor of the Golden State Mutual building. They proved that a business built for – and by – Black people could not only profit, but become fantastically successful at a national level. The company changed the lives of generations of Black Angelenos by offering loans and helping build generational wealth, at a time when discrimination and segregation prevented African Americans from investing in property and participating in majority society. Back then, as now, the Golden State Mutual building stood as a symbol of Black excellence, success and resilience.

Recommending Reading

+Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building NRHP nomination form

+Five Black architects who helped shape L.A.’s Mid-Century style! (LA Conservancy, 2021) – includes more background on James Garrott, designer of the Golden State Mutual building

+The Pride of West Adams (Curbed, 2020)

+The Legacy of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company: More Than A Business (Exhibition at the California African American Museum)

+A golden collection of African American art in Los Angeles (LA Times, 2013)