Maggie Lena Walker was born 11 months before Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived on the island of Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, and began enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation in one of the last parts of the Confederacy to surrender, the event that gave birth to the Juneteenth celebration. Walker herself was never a slave but was the child of a slave and grew up in a heavily segregated Richmond and lived with the legacy of slavery. But she was unusually ambitious, by the standards of then or now, and had an innate understanding of how community wealth is really created. She used those skills to help people move past that legacy.
In 1903, Walker launched the St. Luke Penny Savings Banks in Richmond, becoming the first woman, black or white, to open a bank in the United States. Walker understood the power that a community bank could have in helping people build and establish their own wealth and futures. She endeavored despite racism, sexism, and the oppression of Jim Crow laws, opening not just the bank, but also a newspaper and a department store as well. She was a one-person economic engine, and given we just celebrated Juneteenth, I wanted to spend a few minutes with this notable American banker.
Early in her life Walker was involved with the Independent Order of St. Luke, a mutual aid society focused on caring for the city's Black women as well as helping people bury their dead. Others might have seen a collective of poor Black women, but Walker didn't. She understood exactly the power they had and how to harness it. What Walker saw was "so many good women, willing women, noble women, whose money is here." Walker understood that the money was the key, despite their seeming poverty. And she understood there was a way to turn that money into prosperity.
"Let us put our money out at usury among ourselves, and reap the benefit ourselves," she said. "Let us have a bank that will take the nickels and turn them into dollars."
In 1903, she opened the St. Luke Penny Bank in Richmond. The bank sold 200 shares of stock to members of the IOSL. On the bank's first day of business, it took in $8,000 of deposits from almost 300 customers. One eager but constrained depositor put in only 31 cents. In 1911, it moved into a new building the bank commissioned on the corner of First and Marshall Streets.
Walker understood the power of community and wealth. She was a powerful orator and championed social causes across a number of avenues. She used her St. James Herald paper to champion civil rights, even supporting a boycott of the local segregated streetcars, and she was active in both the National Association of Colored Women and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She even organized the first Black Girl Scout troop in the south.
Walker operated the bank as president on a salary of $25 a week, only four times the salary of the assistant cashier who made $25 a month, and built the bank up over the course of the next three decades. Its assets grew from $38,000 in 1904 to $530,000 in 1920. Walker altered standard banking practices to accommodate its customers. The bank would make loans as small as $5, would accept down payments of as little as 10% for mortgages, and allowed borrowers to refinance rather than have to make the principal repayments on the typical 3-5 year mortgage. By 1924 the bank had 50,000 members, at least 600 of whom had paid off their mortgages in full. In 1930, Walker ensured the bank's survival through the brewing economic depression by merging it with two other Black-owned banks, forming the Consolidated Bank and Trust.
She died in 1934, but her legacy lived on. The current Maggie L. Walker High School in Richmond is a school Walker herself opened in 1930. Her Richmond home is a National Park Service Historic Site. And the bank she founded survived for another seven decades. In 2005, hurt by a series of bad loans, it merged with the Abigail Adams National Bancorp. At the time, it was the oldest continuously operated Black-owned bank in the country. In 2021, the bank was acquired by People's Bank, which operates a branch on the same corner of First and Marshall where St. Luke's operated. There is a brick clock tower out front honoring the branch's history, with a picture of the bank's first president on it. Maggie Lena Walker.
