Atlanta Life Insurance Achieves Legal Reserve Status

In 1922, Alonzo Herndon's company was reorganized as the Atlanta Life Insurance Company and achieved legal reserve status—a financial standard met by only four other Black-owned insurance companies at the time. The company rapidly expanded into six new states during the 1920s, making it one of the largest and most important Black-owned financial institutions in the United States and Herndon Atlanta's wealthiest Black citizen by the time of his death in 1927.