We Belong

A Profile of Hill Harper

When Hill Harper described his powerful family history to me, I exclaimed, “My dad grew up in Houston’s Fifth Ward and lived his whole life wondering about, but never meeting, what he called ‘Black royalty’ . . . and that’s your family!”

The descendant of two generations of accomplished doctors, Hill carries on his storied family tradition. He has a dazzling resume: a triple-Ivy League graduate (magna cum laude from Brown, cum laude from Harvard Law, and with honors from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government). He is an award-winning actor, currently starring on a top ABC show, The Good Doctor. He is the author of four New York Times bestsellers who received particular acclaim for Letters to a Young Brother and The Conversation.

Hill is also a longtime financial literacy activist and recently authored a groundbreaking financial literacy book: The Wealth Cure. Hill has used his public platform to raise visibility of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and he drew inspiration from that tragic event for the name of his recently launched company: The Black Wall Street Digital Wallet, an app now available on iOS and Android. He created this app to build Black wealth by teaching financial literacy and supporting informed community participation in decentralized finance (e.g., cryptocurrencies). The book and the app are both aimed at reducing the racial wealth gap: according to the Wall Street Journal and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics “the median black household holds a fraction, about one-eighth, of the net worth of white households.” Hill is breathing new life into Black Wall Street’s memories with a modern digital version and has pledged the first million in profits from his effort to the survivors of the massacre in Tulsa.

As I learned Hill’s history, his mission to rebuild Black Wall Street shows a continuation of a legacy set in motion by the Hills and Harpers who came before him. I feel deeply honored both to count him as a friend and to join as an advisor to his new company.

Born Frank Eugene Harper, the name “Hill Harper” honors his grandfathers, both successful doctors educated in the first half of the twentieth century. These men were his role models growing up and are still his heroes.

Hill’s maternal grandfather was a graduate of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN, the oldest HBCU pharmacology program. (As Hill described Dr. Harold Hill’s distinguished medical education and deep investment in his community, including serving as a lifelong leader in the NAACP, I reflected on stories my dad shared long ago about the Black pharmacy as a neighborhood cornerstone.) After graduating from Meharry, Dr. Hill set up a pharmacy in the small town of Seneca, South Carolina. He was a “very proud, very strong Black man.” Harper remembers sitting at the “old-school” pharmacy in the summertime, eating popsicles and reading comic books, and hearing his grandfather answer the phone in his deep, rough voice: “Dr. Hill. Piedmont Pharmacy, 8750 [the last four digits of his telephone number].”

Dr. Harold Hill’s business was built under Jim Crow. Black people were not welcome at Rexall or Walgreens, so they went to Piedmont Pharmacy instead. Customers sidled up to the marble soda fountain to order a lemon-lime rickey; some who lacked cash would barter, trading a sack of potatoes or chickens for prescriptions. Some customers had neither money nor something to trade. But even when no payment was made or reasonably expected, Dr. Hill provided the prescribed medicine and recorded the transaction in his ledger. (Hill noted that his childhood memory of the ledger may have planted seeds for his later attraction to blockchain technology.)

Dr. Hill worked tirelessly caring for Seneca’s Black community, wearing his white smock every day, staying at the counter through lunch (the only time most people were able to get their prescriptions), then going home for “supper” from 2:30–3:15pm. With these rhythms, he built both a business and a life, serving his community while being a devoted husband and raising Hill’s mom and aunt.

Hill said that if he “could just be 1/10” of his grandfathers, he “would be a success.” Thinking of people walking into the pharmacy to be cared for by his community-patron grandfather “informs a lot” of who Hill is today.

Hill’s paternal grandfather, Dr. Harry D. Harper, Sr., was also a distinguished doctor and community leader. He grew up in Fort Madison, Iowa, where his own father (Hill’s great-grandfather) had built the town’s waterworks. Hill’s great-grandfather had five sons, and he encouraged and supported all of his children to attend college and graduate school. One by one, the brothers went to Howard Medical School and returned to Fort Madison upon graduation. Together, they set up an OBGYN practice, which served women from Iowa and three neighboring states because it was the only top-flight hospital that served Black patients.

Like other hospitals, nearby banks also did not serve Black customers, so the brothers kept their cash at home. While this practice proved devastating in the Tulsa Race Massacre when accumulated wealth went up in flames, for the Harper brothers it was a saving grace: when the Great Depression arrived and banks failed, having their money outside the banking system secured their future. The brothers used these funds to buy a building that spanned a city block, which then became the home of the medical clinic.

The Harper brothers built the Harper Apartments on top of the clinic, and Hill’s father, Harry D. Harper, Jr., grew up there. The senior Dr. Harper became a leader in Iowa’s Black community, serving as the head of Iowa’s NAACP chapter. After he retired, he bought an 88-acre farm, which is where young Hill Harper got to know and admire his grandfather. Reflecting on his grandfather’s farm, which featured both an indoor and outdoor pool, Hill’s admiration shines through: “He was the man!” Dr. Harper, Sr. died when Hill was ten years old.

Reflecting on his own father’s similarity in stature to Hill’s grandfather, Hill smiled broadly: “My father inherited all of that swag . . . swag for days. . . . He wore more gold chains than Mr. T.” Harry Harper, Jr. also went to Howard Medical School, and he became a psychiatrist, ultimately setting up a conditional release program to get nonviolent offenders out of prison early and into treatment. Although Hill’s artistic aesthetic does not obviously mirror his father’s “bling,” Hill reports that his love of fancy cars was indeed passed down from father to son.

Dr. Harry Harper, Jr. met Hill’s mother, Marilyn, at Howard Medical School. She was one of the first Black anaesthesiologists in the United States. Although she and Hill’s father were opposites, their union lasted long enough to produce Hill and his older brother, Harry Harper III. Later, she left Iowa for San Francisco and became the only Black person and the only woman on the UCSF faculty. Hill talked about the power of seeing old photographs of her “in a sea of white men,” her colleagues, and marveled that he could not imagine what she endured in her journey. Although his father passed away from cancer when Hill was still young, his mother is doing well: she lives in Aspen, CO, is a “voracious reader” of multiple books a month, and is a very spiritual person — Hill referred to her as a “shaman” (I resolved to learn more about this and meet her in person whenever possible).

Hill grew up in Iowa, and his parents did not allow their children to watch much TV (an “antenna family,” not a “cable or satellite family”). When he visited his grandparents in Fort Madison and Seneca, he would watch older syndicated reruns such as Sanford & Sons and The Jeffersons, but he was not familiar with newer content (and laughs that, despite being an actor, he has the same philosophy now with his five-year-old son, sharply limiting access to TV).

As Hill reflected on his happy childhood surrounded by loving family, he said, “My grandfathers represented such a strength and stability for my family. Unknowingly, I just always felt confident and comfortable in my skin, with who I was, confident that there was nothing I couldn’t do. It really emanates from them. They truly were the patriarchs of the family.” He also noted that “having a bellwether of a male role model that creates a sense of center and stability is so critical,” especially in a world where “3 out of 4 Black boys are being raised by single moms and may not have the options or opportunity I had.” Hill noted that because his father has passed away, his son “doesn’t have a grandfather as a stability figure.” But Hill recognizes the importance of “creating space for a child to somehow subconsciously know that they are magnificent, brilliant, come from a lineage of stability and power and intelligence — I got that organically.”

Reflecting on how his Ivy League experience may be different from Black students of different backgrounds, Hill said that “it was always foreign to me when I went to school with people who felt insecure in their skin.” He remembered arguing with a Black professor at Harvard Law School who expressed feeling devalued in that environment: “I never even thought of that because I know I deserve to be here. . . . We belong.”

Like Rashaun Williams has done so successfully with Kemet Institute and then his venture capital funds, Hill is making a similar transition: he is moving from a season of teaching financial literacy to the Black community through his books and speaking to a season of helping the Black community build generational wealth through his new fintech company.

Listening to Hill talk about the Harper Apartments atop Dr. Harper, Sr.’s Iowa medical practice and the soda fountain at Dr. Hill’s South Carolina pharmacy gave me a sense of why the destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood cuts so deeply in his soul and has informed his new initiative. While for many of us the massacre and destruction of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street is newly learned history that is almost too painful to grasp, Hill is descended from two grandfathers who each anchored versions of Black Wall Street in their own states.

And Hill is passionate about working together within the community to close the wealth gap: “There’s no way we [scale] positive impact unless we do it collectively.” Hill believes deeply in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s quotation about our interrelatedness: “In a real sense all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be . . . This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

As I reflect on Dr. King’s words on interrelatedness, I feel a profound sense of gratitude to have connected with Hill and the five other extraordinary Black Founders and Investors I’ve been blessed to learn from and feature this year. In my next post, I look forward to sharing reflections on these six profiles and an update on my plans to launch a broader, standalone project in this space.

To hear my conversation with Hill, follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.

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