June Middleton was a lawyer, small business coach, educator and TV show host, but she's best known as, by the available accounts, the first African American woman to be a stockbroker.
Middleton smashed that barrier in 1962 by passing the registered representative test and later selling securities as a "standout" broker for a firm named Hornblower & Weeks-Hemphill, Noyes, according to "
She may have spent time with Merrill Lynch, the company mentioned by
Middleton was only 27 years old in February 1965, when
"She is, so far as anybody on Wall Street can determine, the only Negro woman selling securities for a New York Stock Exchange firm," the article by Vartanig Vartan said.
Middleton was born in Teaneck, New Jersey, and she decided after a school trip to the exchange at 13 that the idea of getting a seat there "presented a challenge to me," she told the Times.
"She attributed her position to education and exposure to the business when she was a child," Bell wrote. "The only Black child in a Manhattan public school, her class read the stock market tables every day and learned how to interpret the figures and their movement. Social limitations afflicting both African Americans and women impeded her immediate fulfillment of her career aspirations. So she entered the business in the only way she could, as a secretary at another NYSE-member firm called Cohen, Simonson & Company."
She passed the registered rep exam by studying in her free time. The Harlem resident described herself as a sports car enthusiast, and she told the Times she didn't think of herself as a pioneer of the brokerage world.
"I just love this business," she said. "It's exciting. It has widened my scope of interests. I find myself reading about liquid fuel for rocket engines and about offshore drilling."
Roughly half her clients were Black — a customer base that shared the same goals in common with white investors of similar incomes, the newspaper reported as if sharing a surprising finding. Between other dated references to her cooking, the need to remove her left earring when selling stocks on the phone and the "quite unusual" fact that she enjoyed playing chess, Vartan also noted her view of being one of the few women registered with a brokerage.
"A woman can get an investor's ear more quickly than a man," she told the Times. "After all, many women handle the finances in their family."
At some point, Middleton left the industry and launched her own business as a computer and business management consultant to small companies. She received admission to the New York Bar in 2006 after graduating from Touro Law Center on Long Island. She earned another degree in economics and accounting from Columbia University, and she went on to teach classes on small business accounting and entrepreneurship at New York University's School of Continuing and Professional Education, according to
In addition, she hosted a local access cable TV show called "
"The word 'mentoring,' really, is very much related to investing," she said. "I don't know if you've ever looked at it that way, but if you are mentoring a person, a being, it's like investing in some kind of instrument, as such, to hopefully make it better and to give it more meaning and more value."
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