The Atlanta Life Insurance Company, founded in the era of violent white racial animosity and vitriolic Jim Crow segregation, cemented its operational success through a commitment to sustained financial solvency and promptness in paying claims.
[8] Growing up the polar opposite of his sharecropping roots father, Herndon was not accustomed to outdoor or sportsman activities.
The only other African-American classmate, Benjamin Tanner Johnson, became a tireless champion for African American owned banks where he helped found the African-American-owned New England People's Finance Company, worked as a Connecticut state supervisor in the Works Progress Administration (WPA), taught finance at Howard University, and served as Executive Secretary in the National Urban League of Canton, Ohio.
Their vacation occurred less than two months after the RMS Carpathia had navigated the North Atlantic ice fields to rescue 705 survivors of the April 15, 1912 Titanic disaster.
[12] By his mid-twenties, Herndon had become an extensive domestic and world traveler, with his father's blessing and planning trips overseas visiting numerous places including New York, Rome, Italy and other parts of Europe.
Herndon helped his father Alonzo navigate difficult times, including the devastating 1918 Spanish flu epidemic and the murderous Tulsa Massacre of 1921, both which burdened the company with death and sick claims.
[22] Possibly influenced by his theatrical mother Adrienne's legacy, Norris Herndon seriously considered a professional career in theatre and the arts, attending every show his father would permit.
When Norris initially resisted his father's insistence that he fully commit to inherit Atlanta Life, Alonzo wrote the following to Norris: “You spoke of the shows, but that is not very interesting to me compared with your studies.”[9] Once Norris changed gears, improved his grades, graduated college from Atlanta University, and began to help his father at Atlanta Life during summer breaks in Savannah, Alonzo wrote: "I could not help tears coming in to my eyes when I read your letter, and thought of the promise to take the burden from my shoulders.
Like many prominent gay African-American men of this era, Herndon's sexuality was largely considered an "open secret", with efforts made to minimize "hint of any scandalize behavior to threaten the precarious image of larger African American community.
"[24][25] Alonzo Herndon, a creature of white Victorian American society's preoccupation with manhood, piety, and self-control, was both aware and disturbed by Norris' alleged sexual orientation.
African- American periodical Ebony emphasized Norris’s secrecy and elusiveness, call him “the millionaire nobody knows,” a man “available to a select group of intimates and executives, who guard his whereabouts with the passion of secret service men protecting the president.” His silence is not surprising given the climate of the McCarthy era and his position as the sole heir to an African American fortune in a racially divided city.
In Atlanta Life Insurance Company, Alexa Benson Henderson argues that “a distinctive humanitarian and philanthropist influence emanated from Norris,” and “he chose to make his participation quiet and unobtrusive.” This agrees nicely with the assertion put forward by historian John Howard.
Howard’s idea suggests that there was secrecy amongst queers and remarkable silence with regard to homosexuality in American society as whole during the early twentieth century.
For unknown reasons, almost all of the interviewees in Howard’s study described a covert approach to coping with homosexuality as young men came of age in the first half of the century.
[11] Jesse Hill, a University of Michigan graduate and company actuary, replaced Herndon as Atlanta Life's president.
The ascension of a non-Herndon family member to the top leadership post heralded a new era in expanding Atlanta Life's business model.