Introducing the Founders of Black Women’s Wall Street: Pioneers in Financial Empowerment© Provided by The UBJ

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At first, Kelly Ifill had no interest in following in her family's footsteps.

Her father has a long-running contracting business. Her grandmother ran a cleaning service. Her aunt, uncle and even some cousins have experienced the highs and lows of running a small business.

"I had no interest in being an entrepreneur," Ifill, 37, tells CNBC Make It with a chuckle. "I was like, 'I don't want that. It looks hard!'" Instead, she was a schoolteacher, then an MBA candidate and a staffer for seed-stage...

After buying stock in Rivian — the electric vehicle maker that promised a hotly anticipated SUV or truck version of a Tesla — at $72 a share, San Francisco tech program manager Carter Gibson wasn’t thrilled when the price dropped to an all-time low of $19.25 this past week.

A Wall Street darling, backed by Ford and Amazon, the latter of which placed an order for 100,000 electric delivery trucks, Rivian Automotive Inc. had the biggest IPO of 2021. The company was valued at more than Gener...

It took 179 years after the New York Stock Exchange was established in 1792 for a Black investment firm to take a seat.

And while there were already Black financiers and businessmen such as America’s first Black millionaire, Jeremiah G. Hamilton, who died in 1875, there are others who set the groundwork for today’s generation of Black Wall Street brokers and financiers.

Here are 11 who were among the first to break through on Wall Street.

Thorvald McGregor and Lawrence Lewis: Each of these m...