Ask Sheila Johnson what she was like as a child, and it doesn’t take long to get a picture of the qualities that helped her become America’s first Black woman billionaire. Around age 11, for instance, she started waking up at midnight to practice the violin—in part so that her fledgling string work wouldn’t disturb her family during the day.
“They didn’t enjoy listening to me as much as I enjoyed playing,” the 74-year-old says, sitting in the airy presidential suite of the Salamander Hotel in Washington, D.C. Her hospitality company—the Salamander Collection—teamed up with a British property-management firm last year to buy the building from the Mandarin Oriental Group in a deal widely reported to be worth $140 million.
“I’ve always been this way; I don’t know why,” she says. “I really would keep my priorities in order. If I had a goal in mind, that’s what I was going to do.” True to form, she eventually mastered the instrument, earning a music degree from the University of Illinois in 1970.
And though her parents’ professionalism must have rubbed off—her late father, George Crump, M.D., was among the nation’s first Black neurosurgeons; her mother, Marie, was an accountant in an era when working outside the home was uncommon for the wives of men in white-collar jobs—Johnson’s innate determination and resilience would propel her through three extraordinary professional arcs. First, she was an award-winning violin teacher, starting and leading a Washington, D.C.–area children’s orchestra that performed internationally. Amid that work, she cofounded Black Entertainment Television, which she and her then-husband, Robert, sold to Viacom for $3 billion in 2001. And since 2005, she has been assembling a portfolio of luxury hotels. Today, the Salamander Collection owns and operates seven five-star resorts from Aspen to Anguilla. She’s also the only Black woman to own stakes in three…