Who Was Maggie Lena Walker?

Maggie Lena Walker was the first Black woman to serve as the president of a bank in the United States. For decades she was also the head of a fraternal society that sought to offer Black people financial and community security at a time when race-biased insurance premiumsඣ an🉐d other forms of financial institutional discrimination were legal. She also founded a newspaper, called the St. Luke Herald, that spoke out about civil rights abuses.

Walker holds a vaunted place in the history of women-owne💟d banks in the United States. The bank she founded, the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia—later known as the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company—was at one point the longest continually Black-operated bank in the country. Walker’s house was turned into a national historic landmark in 1975 and purchased by the National Park Service in 1979. Her statue, located in the Jackson Ward neighborhood of Richmond, once known as the “Harlem of the South,” was the city’s first to recognize a woman.

Early Life and Education

Born on July 15, 1864 to a formerly enslaved mother, Elizabeth Draper, and a White Irish immigrant father, Eccles Cuthbert, during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, Maggie Lena Walker went on to play a central role in advancing the Black community during the peak of the Jim Crow era. She died in 1934 as a result of complications from diabetes.

Walker's father, Eccles Cuthbert—a reporter for the New York Herald—and her mother, Elizabeth Draper were not legally able to marry each other. Soon after Walker was born, her mother married William Mitchell, the Black butler for the house where she also worked as a cook. The couple had a son, Johnnie Mitchell, in 1870. The marriage ended with William Mitchell’s death in 1876. Though the death was ruled a suicide, his wife insisted that he had been murdered.

Walker attended public schools for Black children—new at the time—in Richmond, Virginia. She went to the Lancasterian School, the Navy Hill School, and the Richmond Colored Normal School. After graduating in 1883, she worked as a teacher at Lancasterian. However, once she married Armstead Walker Jr., a builder, on Sept. 14, 1886, she stopped teaching because of a school policy that forbade married women from teaching. The couple had three sons, one of whom died in infancy, and adopted a daughter.

Notable Accomplishments

Walker lived and worked in an era when basic rights forꦫ Black Americans were not guaranteed. Her life and work also coincided with very active periods of the domestic terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, and wider acts of violence agaꦚinst freed Black people.

When Walker was living in Virginia, the Klan was responsible for countless beatings, floggings, kidnappings, and lynchings in Virginia and elsewhere in the United States . In this climate—incredibly hostile towards Black people—Walker used her bank to empower the emerging Black middle class in a city, Richmond, that had been the capital of the Confederate States of America only decades before.

Walker was the first Black woman to found a bank in the U.S. While female bank presidents were not entirely unheard of at the time, other bank presidents were White and usually members of the upper class. Walker was a Black woman and someone without access to inherited wealth; she had to conquer daunting challenges in her path to success. Notably, her achievement was considered wholly unique within the Black community in many accounts of her life.

Independent Order of St. Luke

While a student, Walker had become involved with the Independent Order of St. Luke, a fraternal organization that aimed to educate and improve the material conditions of life for Black people in the segregated American South. She would rise to the society’s highest position, Grand Secretary, by 1899, a position she would hold until her death.

The order was on the brink of bankruptcy when Walker took the helm. In 1901, she revealed her plans to save it, including founding a newspaper and a bank. The society flourished under her leadership. By 1924, the organization had over 50,000 members and 1,500 local chapters.

The St. Luke Herald

Walker started a newspaper, The St. Luke Herald, in 1902. The audience of the publication was members of the Independent Order of St. Luke’s; it remained active until the Great Depression took a toll on the membership of the order, which funded the paper’s operations.

Walker was conscious of the role of mass communication in creating an informed membership, as well as the importance of access to information in creating a successful Black community. In her 1901 proposal for the paper, Walker said that it would be “a trumpet to sound the orders, so that the St. Luke upon the mountain top, and the St. Luke dwelling by the side of the sea, can hear the same order, keep step to the same music, march in unison to the same command, although miles and miles intervene.”

The Herald was also active in writing about civil rights abuses. The paper wrote pro–civil rights editorials, for instance, that took a stand against the Virginia Constitutional Convention’s 1902 inclusion of literacy tests and poll taxes to block Black voters, as well as against the 1904 segregation of Richmond’s trolley system.

Founding a Bank

Walker’s bank was founded “from scratch,” according to historical accounts, and without access to preexisting financial or structural advantages. Walker thought that a savings bank would counter segregationist policies, loan discrimination, and other forms of racism, and help to kindle economic independence within the Black community. She outlined her plan for the bank at the annual convention of the Independent Order of St. Luke: “Let us put our moneys together; let us use our moneys; let us put our money out at usury among ourselves, and reap the benefit ourselves. Let us have a bank that will take the nickels and turn them into dollars.”

The Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank opened in Richmond in 1903 and was massively successful. By 1920, it had facilitated more than 600 mortgages to Black families. However, Walker’s bank was not the only Black-owned bank in Richmond. Five such banks opened in the city between 1888 and 1920. Still, as a result of her bank, Walker received membership in the Virginia Banker’s Association, something not given to any other Black bank presidents.

The bank survived the 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:Great Depression, and, in 1929, it consolidated with a couple of other Black-owned banks in the city. It was bought out by Abigail Adams National Bank in 2009, at which point it was no longer Black-owned. Under the name of Premier Bank, it is still in business today.

The Bottom Line

Walker was the first Black woman to found a bank in the United States, a feat she accomplished during a period of extreme racism and sexism in the former capital of the Confederacy. Her successes—which surmount♔ed obstacles of class, race, and gender—are considered exceptional and unique in American history.