Banking on Freedom, by Shennette Garrett-Scott (chapter 2)

BANKING ON

FR EEDOM Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal

Shennette Garrett-Scott

2

“Who Is So Helpless as the Negro Woman?”

THE INDEPENDENT ORDER OF ST. LUKE AND THE QUEST FOR ECONOMIC SECURIT Y, 1856– 1902

Everyone will see. Everyone will know. Lizzie Draper could no longer hide the dark-brown belly growing under her skirts. Only fourteen years old, she had not understood when the Irish Confederate soldier who was boarding with her mistress had forced himself inside her, but she understood now that she was pregnant, that a life was growing inside her. Her thoughts turned to her own mother. She did not know her mother’s name. Had she ever known it? Had she forgotten it? She shook her head at the last thought, not wanting to believe that she could ever have let it slip from her memory. Now she wrung her mind for any recollection, any scrap of memory, hoping that the woman whose name she did not know might show her what to do now. Had her mother tried to hide her, too, knowing the kind of life that lay ahead for her daughter? Had she chosen to love her daughter, or had she kept her distance, knowing that either of them might be sold away from the other at a moment’s notice? Lizzie’s mistress, Elizabeth Van Lew, was kind enough, but an enslaved woman could never know what a white slaveholder might do.

Lizzie’s worlds—inside and out—had been turned upside down. It was a difficult, hard time in Richmond that summer of 1864. The dead haunted the city; soldiers’ bodies lay in rough-hewn coffins that lined the streets.

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“Who Is So Helpless as the Negro Woman?”

White women begged on nearly every corner for a peck of meal. Miss Van Lew had money—she was one of the richest women in the city—but Lizzie wondered how long it could last when a barrel of meal sold for more than $200. Perhaps Miss Van Lew would sell Lizzie or her baby. Lizzie had little choice, no choice at all, really. She gave birth on July 15, 1864, to a little girl the color of curdled milk. She called her Maggie Lena, named for a woman she had heard some call a prostitute, but Lizzie knew she walked with Jesus.

Everyone would see. Everyone would know.

Everyone will see. Everyone will know. William M. T. Forrester had gotten used to lying on the tattered, rolled up linen flag, with its thirty-three fading white stars, but he could never shake the fear that someone might find it. Some of his neighbors grudgingly accepted the presence of a colored family in the affluent Shockoe Hill section of Richmond, only a block from the Confederate capitol, but what would people do if they knew about the U.S. flag? It had been three years since his brother Richard, working as a page at the Virginia Capitol, had picked the flag out of a pile of rubble that the Confederates planned to burn after they hoisted their own flag and transformed the capitol from the symbolic to the actual headquarters of the Confederacy. In the heady excitement of May 1861, the men celebrating what they felt would be a short assertion of southern honor and way of life did not pay much attention to a thirteen-year-old colored boy running in the crowd. Richard had hidden the flag under the bed he shared with his two brothers. Now, on April 3, 1865, almost four years later, William watched Richmond burn. He worried that the flag, even more than the city, might be destroyed, too.

Thankfully, the Forresters’ home escaped damage. The city quickly recovered—physically, at least, if not psychologically—from its traumatic losses: the fire, the war, slavery. William had always been free and had lived a relatively privileged life as the grandson of an enslaved cook and a Jewish lawyer in Richmond on his father’s side and a free woman of color and a wealthy Jewish merchant in New Orleans on his mother’s. His Jewish family in Richmond had accepted his parents as part of their family and had left his parents a home and some money. At the war’s end, however, people who had been both free and enslaved now sought refuge and opportunity in whatever quarter they could. The Freedmen’s Bureau represented one

“Who Is So Helpless as the Negro Woman?”

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refuge. Richard carefully gathered up the flag, hidden away for four years, and took it to the Freedmen’s Union Industrial School, which his sister attended. The women there, those formerly enslaved and those who had always been free, cried and sung and clapped their hands at the sight of the worn flag. They hung it on the wall of the school so that they could see it every day of their new free lives. Everyone would see. Everyone would know.1 The fates of Elizabeth Draper, an illiterate, formerly enslaved woman, and Richard and William Forrester, educated, privileged men of Richmond’s colored elite, might never have converged if not for the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL), a secret society that the former joined for a measure of security and the latter for a taste of power. Their lives would entwine through Draper’s daughter, Maggie Lena Draper Mitchell Walker, who devoted more than fifty years of her life to the IOSL. Walker’s life and service in the IOSL reflect the challenges and opportunities that freedom presented to the first generations of African Americans born in freedom. She lived a life of both poverty and privilege, which shaped her vision of economic security and development for African American women in particular and for African Americans in general. Walker would come to wield incredible economic, social, and cultural power within Richmond’s black community and beyond.

In 1901, as the new grand secretary of the IOSL, Maggie Lena Walker wondered aloud to an audience of several hundred IOSL delegates, “Who is so helpless as the Negro woman? Who is so circumscribed and hemmed in, in the race of life, in the struggle for bread, meat, and clothing as the Negro woman?” She had saved the IOSL from near collapse only a few years before, and she saw the so-called helpless Negro woman as the key to the IOSL’s future strength and prosperity. She saw them as “so many good women, willing women, noble women, whose money is here.”2 The IOSL would turn that money into capital, collecting and mobilizing it to create businesses and jobs.

Walker envisioned the IOSL as a financial institution, not merely a social one. Buildings and halls were the showplaces of a fraternal order’s popularity and strength, but alongside manufacturing and industrial concerns, banks, stores, and other businesses, they represented important investments in black communities.

This chapter explores the development of the Independent Order of St. Luke and its efforts to provide economic security for black women and

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“Who Is So Helpless as the Negro Woman?”

their families. Fraternal societies like the IOSL brought workers and capitalists into relationships in unexpected ways. The IOSL turned workers’ small savings and investments into capital, creating businesses that offered services, created jobs, and provided security for working people. It also revealed the important roles that gender and race played in shaping broader economic processes and practices by creating and maintaining important financial institutions: a bank and an insurance company. In the decades after emancipation, however, the IOSL’s success was hardly a foregone conclusion.

It struggled to create viable and affordable long-term financial products in which black communities were willing to trust and invest. As major stakeholders in their communities and institutions, black women struggled against conflicting narratives of their dependency and inadequacy, narratives that undermined the financial autonomy they struggled to carve out in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century.

“LIKE DOVES TO THEIR WINDOWS”: THE BIRTH OF THE GRAND UNITED ORDER OF ST. LUKE, 1856– 1869

Mary Ann Prout (see fig. 2.1) organized the St. Luke Society, a mutual benefit society that provided modest sickness and death benefits for women and children, in 1856. The group met in her beloved Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Baltimore.3 Prout had joined Bethel before the church was formally organized, when black Methodists knew the congregation as the Bethel Free African Society.4 When the church formally organized in April 1816, Bethel AME grew into the largest church in Baltimore and the second-largest AME church in the country. In a sermon calling for the congregation’s formal incorporation, Rev. Daniel Coker declared, “We shall see our brethren come flocking to us like doves to their windows. And we as a band of brethren, shall sit down under our own vine to worship, and none to make us afraid.”5 Prout, who remained an active and devoted member her entire life, used the church as a platform and the St. Luke Society as a tool to open up opportunities for black women.6 Prout had been born a free woman in South River, Maryland, on February 14, 1800 or 1801, and her family moved to Baltimore when she was a small child.7 As a young woman, Prout and her family were actively involved in

The story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by black women.

“Garrett-Scott’s extensively researched and documented study is the first history of U.S. finance that puts African American women at the center. Banking on Freedom makes a tremendously monumental contribution to African American banking history, and it substantially enriches our understanding of U.S. finance and capitalism.”

Juliet E. K. Walker, author of The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship

Robin D. G. Kelley, author of the Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression

N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida

“Recovering the important and active role black women have played in the development of modern American capitalism, Banking on Freedom is a paradigm-shifting work that stands to make a monumental contribution to the field and is certain to inspire future generations of scholars.”

Tiffany Gill, author of Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry

“Garrett-Scott reclaims the stories of black women who—as bank founders and clerks, investors, aspiring homeowners, loan seekers, and, yes, as those denied loans—asserted their own economic ethos. A compelling account of black women’s ideas about money, savings, lending, obligation, and economic well-being.”

Elsa Barkley Brown, University of Maryland

“A beautifully written, comprehensive, and highly original study of black women’s savvy business acumen in the aftermath of slavery through the early twentieth century. Garrett-Scott should be commended for boldly modeling just how gender and race shape capitalism and finance in ways few scholars have addressed.”

Daina Ramey Berry, author of The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to the Grave, in the Building of a Nation

studies at the University of Mississippi.

ISBN: 978-0-231-18390-1 COLUMBIA STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF U.S. CAPITALISM

Columbia University Press / New York

cup.columbia.edu

Printed in the U.S.A.

Shennette Garrett-Scott is assistant professor of history and African American

Cover image: Courtesy of the National Park Service, Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site

“Moving fluidly from the change purse to the bank vault, Banking on Freedom offers the first full accounting of the financial sector, womanhood, and Afro-America simultaneously transformed. Rich and brilliant.”

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

“Garrett-Scott’s compelling and highly original account demonstrates that, for black people, banks were more than financial institutions. In the hands of black women, capital accumulation, credit, and insurance became community-building practices, mutual aid, strategies for collective survival, and sources of contestation.”