Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal

Between 1888 and 1930, African Americans opened more than a hundred banks and thousands of other financial institutions. In Banking on Freedom, Shennette Garrett-Scott explores this rich period of black financial innovation and its transformative impact on U.S. capitalism through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by black women. Banking on Freedom offers an unparalleled account of how black women carved out economic, social, and political power in contexts shaped by sexism, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation. Garrett-Scott chronicles both the bank’s success and the challenges this success wrought, including extralegal violence and aggressive oversight from state actors who saw black economic autonomy as a threat to both democratic capitalism and the social order. The teller cage and boardroom became sites of activism and resistance as the leadership of president Maggie Lena Walker and other women board members kept the bank grounded in meeting the needs of working-class black women. The first book to center black women’s engagement with the elite sectors of banking, finance, and insurance, Banking on Freedom reveals the ways gender, race, and class shaped the meanings of wealth and risk in U.S. capitalism and society.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/libarts_book/1103/thumbnail.jp

"He ran his business like a white man" : race, entrepreneurship, and the early National Negro Business League in the New South

textBooker T. Washington organized the National Negro Business League (NNBL) in 1900, and it became the largest and most influential black business organization for much of the twentieth century. Enterprising black men and women in the NNBL linked their entrepreneurial activities to a modern, progressive social and political agenda. They relied on discourses of race, nation, and business that were both modern, radical, and progressive and traditional, conservative, and reactionary. The thesis moves beyond prosaic debates about the efficacy of black business and black economic nationalism to consider how black entrepreneurs in the NNBL interacted with the material and cultural dimensions of the political economy. A disconnect often existed between the grand ambitions of the executive leadership and the intrigues of the local league membership. Race and entrepreneurship drew attention to lapses in the rhetoric of progress and change in the New South. Finally, it looks at interracial cooperation and conflict in the NNBL. By privileging blacks' struggles for liberation, the thesis enhances understanding about the many ways blacks struggled to strike a tenable balance between personal agency and structural constraints.Histor

Daughters of Ruth : enterprising black women in insurance in the New South, 1890s to 1930s

textThe dissertation explores the imbricated nature of race, gender, and class in the field of insurance within the political economy of the New South. It considers how enterprising black women navigated tensions between New South rhetoric and Jim Crow reality as well as sexism and racism within the industry and among their industry peers. It complicates the narrative of black southern labor history that focuses more on women as agricultural laborers, domestics, and factory workers than as enterprising risk takers who sought to counterbalance personal ambition and self-interest with communal empowerment. Insurance organizations within black-run secret fraternal societies and formal black-owned insurance companies emerged as not only powerful symbols of black business achievement by the early decades of the twentieth century but also the most lucrative business sector of the separate black economy. Negro Captains of Industry, a coterie of successful, influential, self-made men, stood at the forefront; they represented the keystone of black economic, social, and political progress. The term invoked a decidedly masculinist image of “legitimate” leadership of black business. Considering fraternal and formal insurance, gender-inscribed rhetoric, shaped by racism and New South ideology, imagined black men as the ideal protectors and providers; women became the objects of protection rather than agents of economic development, job creation, and financial security. The dissertation explores how women operated creatively within and outside of normative expectations of their role in the insurance business. The dissertation considers the role of state regulation and zealous regulators who often targeted insurance organizations and companies, the primary symbols of black business success; in other ways, regulation dramatically improved profitability and stability. The dissertation identifies three key periods: the Pre-Regulatory Era, 1890s to 1906; the Era of Regulation, 1907-World War I; and the Professionalization of Black Insurance, Post-WWI to the Great Depression. It also considers the barriers to black women’s involvement in professional organizations. By the late 1930s, enterprising women in insurance lost ground as fraternal insurance waned in influence and as the strongest proponents of the black separate economy promoted a vision that embraced women as consumers rather than business owners.Histor