    
Carey
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Username: Carey
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, November 14, 2008 - 05:52 pm: | 
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Hello
I thought this was an interesting article.
Remembering Maggie Lena Walker: the making of a black bank: Walker became the country's first woman president of a financial institution and founded one of the nation's oldest surviving black-owned banks
Black Enterprise, June, 2004 by Gertrude Woodruff Marlowe
E-mail Print Link Maggie Lena Walker's story, and the organization to which she dedicated her life, begins in 1867 with a nation struggling to repair the ills of slavery. At age 14, Maggie Lena Draper Mitchell (her birth name) joined the local council of the African American fraternal society that later became the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL). She swiftly rose through its ranks to assume leadership as its Right Worthy Grand Secretary-Treasurer in 1890, and, as a result, became a pioneering insurance executive, financier, and civic icon at the turn of the 20th century.
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How To Get Things Done: A Guide To Strategic Planning Prior to 1890, the IOSL had 3,400 members, no reserve funds, no property, and a small staff. By the mid-1920s. Walker, a woman of boundless energy and spellbinding oratorical skills, almost single-handedly brought the IOSL to solvency. In 1903, she established the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, one of the nation's oldest black-owned banking institutions in the United States. By 1924, at the peak of her leadership, she grew the IOSL membership to in excess of 70,000 in 1,500 local chapters. IOSL also boasted a staff of 50 working in its Richmond, Virginia, headquarters, with assets of more than $400,000, and payments of more than $1 million in death claims. Despite her failing health and limited mobility, Walker successfully shepherded St. Luke Penny Savings Bank through the Great Depression. She would eventually merge it with two other black banks based in Richmond to form Consolidated Bank and Trust (No. 20 on the BE BANKS list with $87.28 million in assets), the longest surviving black bank in the country.
This excerpt, from the book A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment by the late Gertrude Woodruff Marlowe (Howard University Press; $29.95), professor of anthropology at Howard University, comes from chapter four, "Theory Into Action." This chapter is but a snapshot of the life of Maggie Walker, a woman whose mother was born a slave. Walker spoke often about the financial empowerment of the Negro community. But she also did something practical toward creating economic wealth for that community. This month, we remember Walker, a true visionary.
--The Editors
As an incipiently revitalized and transformed [Independent Order] of St. Luke moved into the Progressive Era, the vision Maggie Walker so skillfully evoked in her speeches started to be shaped into, and enriched by, the experience of building business and service institutions. Walker and her colleagues spent these years crafting organizations, trying with minimal initial knowledge to learn rapidly enough to move on to the next step. In consonance with the national culture, their key developmental concept was business, a field that many black leaders and white well-wishers emphasized as a major potential avenue of upward mobility for the African American community. W.E.B. DuBois, in his report of the 1899 Atlanta Conference on "The Negro in Business," called for the formation of a National Business Man's League, an idea that Booker T. Washington made a reality in 1900 when he founded the National Negro Business League....
Walker's exhortatory approach to community development presents cooperative economics as a strategy arising from core community values, but one in need of the kind of policing DuBois describes. As her speeches show, St. Luke members also saw it as a confrontational response to segregation. Others observing racial and economic dynamics at the turn of the 20th century agreed, as evidenced by public statements such as, "The almighty dollar is the magic wand that knocks the bottom out of race prejudice...."
By 1900, there were two African American banks in Richmond: the True Reformers and the Nickel Savings Bank. The Nickel Savings Bank was also known as "Dr. Tancil's bank," since physician Richard F. Tancil was its president, and it operated out of his East End home for many years after its founding in 1896. ... Nickel Savings Bank was always small, not having started out as a depository for fraternal funds. Eventually, the Nickel Savings Bank's cashier, Mr. Bass, organized a fraternal organization called the People's Belief Association, and the bank became known as the People's Bank....
In the midst of the summer's community turmoil, Maggie Walker made her big move at the 1901 St. Luke Convention. Besides reporting a modest net growth of the Order, less than 700 new members, she outlined a plan for expanding its activities. Couched in her best "Onward Christian Soldiers" style, Walker described the army, recruited from the ranks of professionals, businessmen, and working men and women, that was ready to march bearing aloft the cross....
First, she called for a savings bank, to be run by the men and women of the Order. She painted a word picture of the growth of money--the first part of which is carved on the memorial stone in front of the present Consolidated Bank and Trust building: "Let us put our monies together; let us use our [moniesl" let us put our monies at usury among ourselves, and realize the benefit ourselves. Shall we longer continue to bury our talent, wrapped in a napkin and hidden away, when it ought to be gaining us still other talents...."
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