Dr. E. A. Welters: Dentist, Entrepreneur and Lawmaker

Historical records and input from his family have given the museum a fascinating glimpse of the life of Dr. E.A. Welters, who was an African-American dentist, businessman, and civic leader in the first half of the 20th century. 

Research into Dr. Welters shows us some of the milestones and challenges faced by a successful Black dentist and entrepreneur in the Jim Crow South. In 1930 he moved his dental businesses to Chicago, even serving as an Illinois State Representative who worked to pass laws against racial discrimination. While Welters wrote early in his career that he was compelled to let business owners assume he was white, he also ran advertisements in publications geared for Black readers. For example, his ads appeared regularly in The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP (founded in 1910). Using the language of the time, those ads described his company as, “The Largest and Only Tooth Powder Manufacturing Corporation Owned and Controlled by Negroes in the United States.”

This print ad for Dr. Welters’ Antiseptic Tooth Powder, found in digitized copies of The Crisis magazine, featured a pretty woman in a broad, ribboned hat and a fur-trimmed coat. Sitting in profile to the viewer, she holds a small bottle of tooth powder in one hand and points at her smile with the other.

What follows is a summary of Dr. Welters’ professional history, as well as a brief timeline of his professional life. His story is at the intersection of dental history and the Great Migration, when Black Americans moved from Southern states to Northern cities in search of new social and economic opportunities.

Dr. Welters’ Wonderful Tooth Powder bottle. SMD1081.0001. View the museum’s record of this object here.

An Introduction to Dr. E. A. Welters

Dr. Edward Alexander Welters (1887-1964), was born in Key West, Fla., and attended what is now Florida A&M University from 1900-1905. He attended Walden University and Meharry Dental College in Nashville, Tenn., graduating in 1910. Florida A&M was founded to serve Black students in 1887 and Meharry in 1886.

When Welters graduated, he returned home to Key West where he was listed as one of eight dentists in that city and only 262 dentists in the state of Florida. For context, there were reportedly 578 registered Black dentists overall in the entire United States that same year.

Welters’ early professional and entrepreneurial career saw him move upstate practicing and growing his tooth powder business in Saint Augustine and Jacksonville, Fla. In 1930, Welters moved his business and family to the historically Black neighborhood of Bronzeville, on the South Side of Chicago, Ill. Once in Chicago, Welters seems to have moved somewhat away from practicing dentistry to focus on business and social advocacy. His youngest daughter, Denise Fletcher, recalls him practicing dentistry in their home on Michigan Avenue, a former mansion-turned-museum that her father and mother, Nina, converted into a home and apartments with the tooth powder factory below. Fletcher recalls the story that Welters had always wanted his own business, that running his own company always been a goal of his even throughout his time at Meharry.

Beginning in 1930, the Food and Drug Administration conducted several seizures of Welters’ Antiseptic Tooth Powder being shipped from the Jacksonville factory, apparently challenging the company’s antiseptic claims. Welters later renamed his product the Welters’ Wonderful Tooth Powder. This was during the early years after the FDA was founded in 1906 to protect citizens from products that were dangerous or falsely labeled, with guidance from the Pure Food and Drug Act. In their analysis of Welters’ tooth powder, however, the FDA described an ingredient list seemingly consistent with those from the many other pharmacists of the day making their own tooth powders. Reports on Dr. Welters’ products seemed to mostly take issue with whether the product was strong enough to live up to the claims on the label, but another seizure happened after he altered the product name and moved north.

In 1936 Welters made news in The Chicago Defender by announcing he planned to sue the University of Chicago for refusing him medical treatment in their clinic based on his race. (At a 1947 rally about racial bias at the University of Chicago, Welters would describe the incident in detail but the coverage in the university’s Daily Maroon newspaper made no mention of legal action.)

In 1945, Welters was elected as an Illinois State Representative and served for two years. His work in government included passing medical and dental laws like the Hospital Licensing Act prohibiting tax exemptions for hospitals that practiced discrimination.  

Welters seems to have had a knack for publicity for his products. His custom-built truck was topped with a replica of a Welters dental powder can and had its own sound system. His 1930 trade catalog featured an artistic photo of a model posing with cosmetics bottles. He was featured in a 1920 ad for another product, Pepsinol.

His friendship with Chicago Defender’s founding editor Robert S. Abbott went back to 1926 at least. Abbott’s friendship may have led to articles about Welters in the Black press, especially the Defender, over the years.

Three men survey a piece of equipment in the Welters Tooth Powder factory. Left to right, they are Robert S. Abbott, Dr. E. A. Welters, and N.K. McGill. To the right side, women in white dresses can be seen seated and working at tables with boxes full of product bottles. From the McGill Family papers at the Vivian G. Harsh Collection of the Chicago Public Library.

Dr. E. A. Welters timeline (1887-1964)

1887 Edward Alexander Welters was born in Key West, Fla. 

He was the youngest of eight siblings and the only boy. Edward Alexander Welters’ father, Samuel Welters (b. 1835) was a Civil War veteran who served with the 34th U.S. Colored Infantry; later he worked as a tugboat pilot. His mother Leonora worked in a coffee shop in the Bahama Village neighborhood of Key West and she later worked as a dressmaker. 

1900-1905 Attended Florida A&M University, then called the State Normal and Industrial College for Colored Students, in Tallahassee, Fla.

1905-1910 Attended Meharry Dental College in Nashville, Tennessee.

A 1976 memoir by Dr. Welters’ son, Edward Alexander Welters, Jr., recalls that, “He made his way through college by working as a waiter on the railroads, working in the Chicago stockyards, during the summer to pay for his college expenses during the winter… He won a solid gold medal to hang on his watch chain for making the best crowns and bridges out of gold in his graduating class.” 

1910 First listing in the Polk Registry of Dentists, in his hometown of Key West.

1916, 1918 St. Augustine, Fla, city directories list E. A. Welters as a resident. St. Augustine was his father’s hometown.

1917 Incorporated the tooth powder business. His initial investors included Dr. D. W. Roberts, a notable Black doctor in Saint Augustine.

1917 Began advertising Dr. Welters’ Antiseptic Tooth Powder in The Crisis magazine.

Sept. 1917 Wrote to African-American beauty product entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker:

Dr. Welters wrote to Walker, “About four-fifth of the drug stores that we are dealing with are white; many of which are absolutely ignorant of the fact that it is a colored product. We find that it is very necessary that we keep them ignorant in many cases.” 

His correspondence with Madam Walker’s offices, now at the Indiana Archives, include a business card indicating that he had a sales agent in Harlem. (The Walker line of beauty products briefly introduced a dental product around this same time.)

June 1918 Moved his practice from St. Augustine to Jacksonville, Fla.

An article in the New York Age reported that, “He will occupy four front rooms on the second floor of the Masonic Temple, equipping same with all modern, dental electrical appliances.” (A 1972 memoir by his son stated that the family’s living quarters in their apartment in the Masonic Temple, compared to his office, were less than modern.)

1918 The St. Augustine city directory stated he was a dentist at 76 Bridge St.

1920 An advertisement in the Washington Bee said his tooth powder plant would be erected in Baltimore, Md. (No more was found on this topic.)

1920 Was featured as a spokesperson in a Pepsinol ad 

1926 The Welters Tooth Powder factory in Jacksonville, Florida was visited by The Chicago Defender’s founding publisher Robert S. Abbott and the paper’s reporter and later attorney, N. K. McGill.

The factory, at the corner of Broad and Union Street, also featured a jewelry store in the front.

1927 or 1928 The custom Welters Tooth Powder vehicle was likely a 1927 or 1928 Graham Brothers truck, sold by Dodge (according to archives staff assessment at The Henry Ford). In his memoir, Edward A Welters, Jr., remembered it being “special built by the Dodge Co.... longer than an undertaker’s hearse,” “a long panel truck about the size of a Coca-Cola delivery truck.”

Dr. E. A. Welters and Mrs. Lottie Welters in front of “the big truck.” Photograph likely by Ellie Lee Weems, this photocopy of it is from the Abbott-Sengstacke Family Papers of the Vivian G. Harsh Collection at the Chicago Public Library

1930 The “Dr. Welters Good Luck Dream Book,” a 48-page cosmetics trade catalog, was published by the E. A. Welters Tooth Powder Company

1930 Moved his business and family to Chicago

Oct. 1930 A shipment of Dr. Welters’ Antiseptic Tooth Powder was seized by the FDA on its way to Tennessee.

May 1931 A shipment of Dr. Welters’ Antiseptic Tooth Powder was seized by the FDA on its way to Louisiana.

January 1932 An FDA ruling said the seized product’s “strength fell below the professed standard of quality under which it was sold.”

January 1933 A shipment of Dr. Welters’ Wonderful Tooth Powder was seized by the FDA on its way from Chicago to Louisiana.

“Analysis of a sample of the article by this Department showed that it consisted essentially of calcium carbonate, soap, and alum flavored with peppermint oil and sweetened with saccharin… It was alleged in the libel that… statements appearing in the labeling, regarding the curative or therapeutic effects of the article, were false and fraudulent.”

April 1935 The Journal of American Dentistry published “More Misbranded Dental Nostrums,” which listed Dr. Welters’ Wonderful Tooth Powder as one of 84 dental products audited, mostly between 1931-1934.

March 1936 An article in the Chicago Defender reports “Jim Crow at Clinics of U. of Chicago. Dr. E. A. Welters Denied Service Because of Color, To Sue.”

Welters planned to challenge the discrimination he faced. The article also mentions background on the racial breakdown of Welters’ patients in Florida, where reportedly “two-thirds of his clients were white,” and it describes his switch from practice to focusing on his business after moving to Chicago.

1945-47 Dr. Welters served in the Illinois General Assembly in the House of Representatives. 

His legislative work led to the Dearborn Homes housing project and to a bill related to dental education, which said that “the state not accredit dental schools which practiced racial segregation when admitting students.”

1947 Awarded a certificate of merit from the Chicago Defender “for contribution to American Principles.”

1951 Purchased a home known as the Brega mansion at 2816 S. Michigan Avenue in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. The Welters Manufacturing Company was next door, at 2810-2812 Michigan Avenue. 

1960 Received a 50-year service award from Meharry Medical College.

April 1962 Opened a “free dental clinic at his Michigan Ave. headquarters, which [was] perhaps the only private facility of its kind in Chicago,” according to the 1964 Chicago Defender obituary, “Rites for Dr. Welters, Civic Pioneer, Friday.” 

1962 Inducted into Florida A&M University’s Hall of Fame and honored in a Sunday evening Vespers ceremony. 

1964 Dr. Welters died of cancer at Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago, Ill.