John Wesley Cromwell Jr. (1883-1971) became the first Black certified public accountant in the United States in 1921. Before entering the profession, he studied mathematics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, earning bachelor's and master's degrees, and learned accounting independently.
He was born in Washington on September 2, 1883, the son of a prominent Washington lawyer. His schooling followed a distinguished line: he graduated from the M Street High School, later known as Dunbar High School, one of the nation's leading public high schools for Black students, and completed a college preparatory program at Howard University before entering Dartmouth. The National Association of Black Accountants' Black History Month profile records that he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth in 1906.
His route to licensure was delayed by exclusion from the experience many states required. Accounting firms generally refused to employ Black candidates, leaving them unable to obtain the supervised work needed to qualify. Cromwell taught mathematics at Washington, D.C.'s Dunbar High School while that barrier remained. When New Hampshire removed its experience requirement in 1921, he could take the examination and become a CPA, a quarter century after the first CPA license was issued in the United States.
Cromwell continued teaching and also spent three years as Howard University's comptroller. Alongside those roles, he provided accounting services to businesses in Washington's Black community. Reference works record him as both an educator and an accountant, the two careers he ran in parallel.
A Tennessee society's centennial tribute put his contribution plainly: he opened a door through which thousands of other Black accountants would eventually pass. A century later, in 2021, the accounting profession marked the centennial of his licensure. When he died on December 16, 1971, he had carried the credential he had to cross state lines to earn for fifty years.
