When Dr. Edward Alexander Welters left Jacksonville in 1930 with his wife, Lottie, and their family, he took more than dental tools and ambition. He brought with him the formula for one of the earliest Black-owned antiseptic tooth powders in the U.S. and a burning desire to see African Americans treated with dignity, whether in the dentist’s chair, the marketplace or the voting booth.
Dr. Welters, born in Key West in 1887, was a graduate of Meharry Dental College, the leading institution for Negro dentists at the time. After establishing his practice in St. Augustine, he soon moved to Jacksonville, where he opened a modern dental office in the Masonic Temple on Broad Street. He was a proud member of Pythagoras Lodge No. 25 under the Most Worshipful Union Grand Lodge of Florida, Prince Hall Affiliated, which was headquartered at 410 Broad St., the very heart of Black enterprise in the LaVilla district.
But Welters wasn’t content to fix teeth one mouth at a time. He manufactured and sold Dr. Welters’ Antiseptic Tooth Powder from his Jacksonville office and boldly advertised it in the pages of The Crisis, the magazine published by the NAACP under the editorship of W.E.B. Du Bois…