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BANKING ON FREEDOM

Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism

 Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism
Series Editors: Devin Fergus, Louis Hyman, Bethany Moreton, and Julia Ott

Capitalism has served as an engine of growth, a source of inequality, and a

catalyst for conflict in American history. While remaking our material world,
capitalism’s myriad forms have altered—and been shaped by—our most
fundamental experiences of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and citizenship. This
series takes the full measure of the complexity and significance of capitalism,
placing it squarely back at the center of the American experience. By drawing
insight and inspiration from a range of disciplines and alloying novel methods of
social and cultural analysis with the traditions of labor and business history, our
authors take history “from the bottom up” all the way to the top.

Capital of Capital: Money, Banking, and Power in New York City, by Steven
H. Jaffe and Jessica Lautin
From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist
Entrepreneurs, by Joshua Clark Davis
Creditworthy: A History of Credit Surveillance and Financial Identity in
America, by Josh Lauer
American Capitalism: New Histories, by Sven Beckert and Christine Desan,
editors
Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement, by David
K. Johnson
 BANKING ON FREEDOM

Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the

New Deal

Shennette Garrett-Scott

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2019 Shennette Garrett-Scott

All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54521-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Garrett-Scott, Shennette, author.
Title: Banking on freedom : black women in U.S. finance before the New Deal /
Shennette Garrett-Scott.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2019] | Series: Columbia
studies in the history of U.S. capitalism | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018045341| ISBN 9780231183901 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780231183918 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Women in finance—United States—History. | African American
bankers—History. | African American women—History. | Women bankers—
United States—History. | African American banks—History.
Classification: LCC HG181 .G357 2019 | DDC 332.1092/520973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045341

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at
[email protected].

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

Cover image: Courtesy of the National Park Service, Maggie L Walker National
Historic Site
To my wind, Malcolm, Dominique, and Malik, and my wings, Vincent
 Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. “I Am Yet Waitin”: African American Women and Free Labor
Banking Experiments in the Emancipation-Era South, 1860s–
1900
2. “Who Is So Helpless as the Negro Woman?”: The Independent
Order of St. Luke and the Quest for Economic Security, 1856–
1902
3. “Let Us Have a Bank”: St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, Economic
Activism, and State Regulation, 1903 to World War I
4. Rituals of Risk and Respectability: Gendered Economic
Practices, Credit, and Debt to World War I
5. “A Good, Strong, Hustling Woman”: Financing the New Negro in
the New Era, 1920–1929
Epilogue

Appendix
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

I owe far more than I can ever repay. I cannot hope to recount fully
my myriad debts here. I would like to thank the following institutions
and entities for financial support that allowed me to complete key
research for this book: the Alfred Chandler Research Grant, Baker
Business Library, Harvard University; the Arch Dalrymple III
Department of History Faculty Research Grant and the College of
Liberal Arts Summer Research Stipend, University of Mississippi; the
Center for Black Business History Research Grant and the Dora
Bonham Research Grant, Department of History, University of Texas;
the John Hope Franklin Center Research Grant, Duke University; the
Mellon Research Grant, Virginia Historical Society; the Postdoctoral
Fellowship in African American Studies, Case Western Reserve
University; and Shelby C. Davis Center for Historical Studies,
Princeton University.
This book would not have been possible without the scraps left in
the archival record, tended and cared for by patient and open-
hearted archivists such as Dana Chandler at Tuskegee University,
Selecia Gregory Allen at Virginia Union University, and (from years
ago) Klydie Thomas at the Maggie Lena Walker National Historic
Site.
 At various academic posts, scholars generously poured into me,
which gave me the courage to tell the stories of thousands of women
whose names we may never know. I am especially indebted to Juliet
Walker, Tiffany Gill, Rhonda Y. Williams, and Charles K. Ross. At
Princeton, conversations with the Davis Center Fellows in our
Wednesday lunches and Friday seminars as well as over dinner
expanded my historical third eye. Warm thank-yous to my cohort—
Giovanni Ceccarelli, Jacco Dieleman, Pablo F. Gómez, Caley Horan,
Vanessa Ogle, and Carl Wennerlind—and the thoughtful and
supportive Davis Center unofficial League of Extraordinary People:
Angela Creager, Jennifer Goodman, and Jack Tannous. (Extra-
special thanks to Caley for the St. Luke pin; it is one of my most
treasured possessions.)
The executive board of the Association of Black Women
Historians has enriched my work and spirit beyond measure. Over
the years, my cohort of sister scholars has been an inspiration and
model of scholarly excellence. Special thanks to LaShawn Harris,
Talitha Leflouria, Ula Y. Taylor, and Francille Rusan Wilson.
I would also like to thank my editor, Bridget Flannery-McCoy, and
the History of Capitalism (HOC) series editors at Columbia University
Press. In 2013, when Louis Hyman asked me to send him a book
proposal, I was flattered—and convinced he was bonkers. I had just
started a new position, and the book seemed so far away. He was
persistent, and I am glad he did not give up on me. Columbia Press’s
HOC series editors, Julia Ott (my writing doula!), Bethany Moreton,
Devin Fergus, and Louis Hyman, must have made a pact to save
their authors from every bad experience they might ever have. I
appreciate your time, expertise, and enthusiasm for this project.
I am so grateful to everyone who ever shared insights on various
incarnations of this work. You pushed me to become a better vessel
for these women’s stories. For any names I missed, charge it to my
head and not my heart. I send my deepest gratitude to every
member of the Delta Women Writers for reading (and rereading)
various drafts and for the good times over wine and dinner across
the Arkansas-Louisiana-Mississippi Delta. Thanks as well to
University of Mississippi faculty and graduate students who
participated in my department colloquium as well as participants in
the Governing Women in Capitalism on Three Continents workshop
and panel at the 2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of
Women, Genders, and Sexualities. I can never repay the many
kindnesses shown by Telisha Dionne Bailey, William Miller Boyd III,
Deirdre Cooper Owens, Susan Grayzel, Mary Heen, Elizabeth
Higginbotham, Tera Hunter, Cherisse Jones-Branch, Rebecca
Marchiel, Elizabeth Payne, Jessica Wilkerson, and Brandon K.
Winford.
My family has been so supportive over the years as I went to
school, stopped, and went back again. I have been blessed by the
three most important women in my life: my aunts Gennie Gilmore
and Daisy Elder and my mother, Johnnie Brossman. Thanks for the
love and support over the years to my siblings, Curtis Sanders Jr.,
Keisha Hall, and Mac Garrett; my father-in-law, Curtis Scott; his wife,
Lynn; my mother-in-law, Alberta Jordan; and my sister-in-law, Kelly
Scott. Thanks to my three little lights who inspire me to leave a
positive legacy: Kyndall, Mason, and Katana. I am always far away,
but you are ever in my heart. I am deeply grateful to the wonderful
women who brought you into the world, Jazzmine MacMillan,
Lunden Whitfield, and Kelsea Salone. I love you all.
Last but not least, thank you to my own little family. Words cannot
express my feelings for you. Malcolm, Dominique, and Malik:
everything I do, I do for you. Finally, to my soul mate and best friend,
Vincent: I just love you.
 Introduction

“Shennette, you are going to make me a millionaire!” Daniel shouted,

his smile cracking open something inside of me.1 It was 2002, the
height of the subprime mortgage industry, and I worked as a loan
processor for a mortgage banker in Dallas. Founded two years
before I came on board, Daniel’s company was ready to burst out of
a two-office suite in a storefront office complex. By the time I had
clocked a year at the job, we had moved to the top two floors of a
gleaming high-rise office building in North Dallas. I saw small
fortunes made—and a few lost. Some loan officers went from living
out of their cars or with relatives to earning more than $20,000 a
month. New crowns and veneers lit up smiles like tiny electric lights.
Luxury cars and new motorcycles filled the parking lot. Some took
out creative loans themselves, purchasing their own minimansions.
Fortune eluded me, however. I earned a base salary and made a
small commission on any loans I closed over my quota. Loans that
paid loan officers upwards of $4,000 each (sometimes tipping up into
the five-figure range) paid me only fifty dollars apiece. I worked
seventy-plus-hour weeks. My family often came to the office with me
in the evenings and on weekends. I imagined that I was part of a
team—that is, until the words that Daniel had meant as praise
shattered my delusion. I was decidedly the overworked, underpaid
cog in a machine that made the riches of others possible. The
moment I realized this, I vowed to pursue my own dream: a PhD.
What I did not realize until much later was that those high-
interest, high loan-to-value loans we were peddling would destroy
the dreams of the home buyers we believed we were helping. The
very first firm I worked for innovated the kinds of loans that would
eventually cripple the industry. Its commercials and direct-mail
marketing materials featured a superstar athlete spokesperson.
People gobbled up the thirty-year, fixed, 18 percent interest home
refinance loans we promoted for 25 percent over the home’s value.
When I was in graduate school, I learned that an FBI probe had
uncovered the firm’s alleged mafia connections. Daniel, who had
sworn I would make him a millionaire, had allegedly embezzled more
than $350,000, which he gave to the Church of Scientology. These
abuses joined thousands of others and contributed to the subprime
mortgage market crash that began in 2007 and brought the entire
U.S. financial system to its knees in 2008.
Pundits looking to root blame for the crisis and its ripple effects
sought flesh and blood, often blaming the victims rather than the
perpetrators. “Subprime” became a way to describe not just risky
financial products but also the individuals who utilized them, painting
them as incapable, rationally and ethically, to perform as responsible
actors in the modern economy and society. The crisis deeply
implicated racial and gendered disparities. The subprime mortgage
debacle in many ways became a black woman.
Even so, my own personal experience as a loan processor led me
to understand that black women, especially unmarried ones with
children, had been particularly susceptible. Slick, targeted marketing
promised the American dream of homeownership, achievable
through any number of creative financing options: 100 percent
financing with no money down and, in some cases, with no
requirement to prove your income or even how much money you had
in the bank; adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) loans with ridiculously
low teaser rates; interest-only ARM loans, where borrowers could
choose every month to pay only the interest on their mortgages at
cents on the dollar. Very few of my black women clients utilized the
most maniacally imaginative loans, but many did receive ARMs and
loans with very low or no down payments.
During federal investigations into the subprime crisis, witnesses
described bank employees’ racially insensitive comments, including
characterizations of subprime loans as “ghetto loans” and black
borrowers as “mud people.”2 Race and gender were key indicators of
which customers received high-cost mortgage loans, even when
controlling for credit and neighborhood. Black women were two times
more likely than white women and three to five times more likely than
white men, depending on the part of the country, to receive a
subprime mortgage.3
When the market crashed, millions of mortgage holders lost their
homes to foreclosure. Given the already-precarious accumulated
wealth of black communities, the effect on black families and
neighborhoods had to be described in terms of magnitude.
Generational. Cataclysmic. Because home equity makes up the
greatest percentage of black wealth, by various estimates blacks lost
between $71 billion and $93 billion through foreclosures and from
higher fees and interest rates associated with subprime loans. Not
surprisingly, black women were prominent among the hardest-hit
victims. They figured disproportionately high in the number of
foreclosures. Even high-earning black women buyers, who might be
expected to weather financial crises, were 80 percent more likely to
lose their properties than whites. Foreclosures decimated
predominantly black subdivisions and neighborhoods, from million-
dollar subdivisions in places like Prince George’s County, Maryland,
to modest working-class developments like Belair-Edison in
Baltimore.4
The so-called subprime crisis of 2007–2008 was far from the first
episode in which African Americans—especially black women—
grappled with the perils and promises of the financial industry in an
effort to improve their lives. In the antebellum years, free and
enslaved women created secret societies with clever names like the
Sisters of Usefulness and the Sisters of the Mysterious Ten. These
societies pooled meager resources to care for the sick, bury the
dead, and buy the most important thing of all: freedom—for
themselves, a child, or an ailing relative. The dislocations of the Civil
War forced them to rely on each other again, especially given the
often-trifling charity of aid societies and Union officers whose
priorities placed Bible lessons, cotton bales, and cookstoves above
black women’s freedom dreams. After the Civil War, experiments to
turn supposedly indolent women into industrious and thrifty workers
privileged paychecks and passbooks as markers of their capacity for
citizenship. Women continued to resist economic exploitation and
limited opportunities to build wealth by creating their own financial
institutions, but the problems of low wages, high-cost credit, and
segregation dogged them at every turn. Disparities and exploitation
in access, lending, and income have consistently underscored black
women’s credit experiences to the present day.
Banking on Freedom considers the black women who created
webs of formal and informal banking and savings institutions from
the eve of the Civil War to the New Deal. These institutions included
building and loan associations; credit unions; burial, mutual aid, and
secret societies; formal banks; and insurance corporations. Black
women played essential roles in blacks’ efforts to use finance to
carve out possibilities within U.S. capitalism and society. As black
women created, maintained, and used their own financial institutions
and networks, they forged their own definitions of economic
opportunity and citizenship. Those definitions refuted stereotypes
about black women’s sexuality and intellect as well as assumptions
about women’s ability to assume and manage economic risk. Black
women also asserted their important financial roles in their families
and communities, linking political demands, such as equal access to
public accommodations, with other demands for reparative justice,
such as access to credit, fair prices, and better housing.
 Black women’s complicated entanglements with U.S. finance
reveal how race and gender mutually reinforce each other as
categories of exclusion and difference—and inclusion and
participation—in U.S. capitalism. Black women responded to these
challenges and opportunities in multifaceted ways. They molded
wealth-building strategies, banking practices, and evaluations of
creditworthiness around gendered economic practices—not only the
individual ways women made and used their money but also the
collective values attached to building institutions, opportunities, and
security for others. Financial institutions and practices represented a
terrain upon which black women worked out familial and community
strategies to achieve economic and social justice under the Jim
Crow system of racial apartheid—even as those same institutions
and practices constrained their vision of what constituted justice.
In many ways, black women’s experiences with finance were
similar to those of ethnic immigrants during the same period. Both
groups operated within circumscribed enclaves defined by those who
were recognized as “white”—a designation that conferred power in
the market. Both immigrants from overseas and blacks—many of
them migrants—developed creative strategies for survival in a
segregated marketplace. Market exclusion explains in part why
many black and ethnic businesses remained small but often
espoused politicized, group-help, and nationalist philosophies. While
poor, working-class, and aspiring-class blacks; ethnic immigrants;
and whites sometimes shared similar values and wealth-building
strategies—even utilized the same institutions and practices—
enterprising blacks faced particular challenges.5
Although ethnic immigrants certainly suffered discrimination,
racism and white supremacy presented harsher challenges for
blacks. Under Jim Crow, legal, cultural, and social proscriptions kept
people who supposedly had even one drop of Negro blood in a
subordinate status. At the same time, it legitimated the privileges and
opportunities of people with white skin—a privilege and opportunity
that ethnic immigrants would ultimately claim for themselves. For
blacks, community-based financial institutions were a bulwark
against Jim Crow, but they could not erase the color line. Whitened
ethnics, by contrast, used the tools of finance—especially residential
mortgages and consumer credit—to gain access to and wrest
benefits from U.S. capitalism in ways that blacks simply could not.
The limitations imposed by capitalism, sexism, and white
supremacy, however, posed a real and ever-present threat, thwarting
even the best-intentioned possibilities. Capitalism itself was a
double-edged sword, built on the exploitation of others’ labor and
shaped by the racial exclusionary logics of Jim Crow. Jim Crow was
a system of laws and customs that blocked blacks’ ambition and
progress through segregation and discrimination, denial of education
and civil rights, economic repression, and violence.6 Emerging in the
late nineteenth century, Jim Crow segregation had, by the early
twentieth century, opened up niche markets marked by racial
difference. Black entrepreneurs capitalized on the separate black
economy but were simultaneously limited in their access to and
ability to compete in wider markets.7 Pseudoscientific theories of
racial and gender differences undergirded Jim Crow and sexism,
fueling assumptions about blacks’ and women’s spending habits,
capacity to assume and manage risk, and ability to save and invest.
These theories reinforced actuarial and business practices that
blocked blacks’ ability to purchase life insurance, get credit, and
make investments, especially in real estate.8 They also blocked
blacks’ access to professional networks and education that would
have helped them stay competitive in the U.S. financial industry.
Between 1888 and 1930, black Americans opened and controlled
more than one hundred banks, which served an almost exclusively
black clientele. They organized thousands of insurance companies
and associations. Banking on Freedom examines this period of
African American financial innovation through the story of the St.
Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia, opened by the members of the
Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL) in 1903. Maggie Lena Walker,
the first black woman to organize and lead a bank, served as
president of the St. Luke Bank for more than three decades.9
As Gertrude Marlowe, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Angel Kwolek-
Folland have documented, Walker, the IOSL, and the St. Luke Bank
provided women with jobs and opportunities in the financial industry.
The IOSL was the largest white-collar employer for black women in
the early twentieth century. By the early 1920s, bank customers had
paid in full more than 650 mortgage loans, and the St. Luke Bank
provided credit and loans to small and large businesses as well as
individuals. Banking on Freedom recognizes the St. Luke Bank as
not only a financial but also a political institution for the black
communities it served, especially regarding issues such as jobs,
housing, and community development.10
The St. Luke and other black banks operated as successful
economic and political institutions, in part because whites favorably
perceived them. Conservatives, moderates, and even extremists
could support segregated economic achievement because they
believed it kept black political ambitions in check by championing
achievement in other areas. In addition, business seemed to be a
reasonable, civil, and beneficent solution to the ubiquitous “Negro
problem” while effectively eliminating black competition. However,
black banks became targets of state surveillance and policing in the
years before and after World War I.
Every cent saved, every nickel loaned, and every dollar invested
through women-controlled institutions like the St. Luke Bank
presented possibilities. As black women built, ran, and patronized
the St. Luke Bank, they helped construct and alternately deconstruct
discourses about race, risk, and rights. However, negative
discourses devalued black women’s morality, intellect, and fitness for
citizenship in the context of Jim Crow, industrialization, and
imperialism, and they discouraged women from taking financial risks
and practicing economic autonomy, which were often constructed as
markers of masculine privilege and male rights.
 From the perspective of black women themselves, financial
institutions presented a means to both accommodate and challenge
capitalist accumulation, sexism, and white supremacy. For example,
under Walker’s leadership, the St. Luke Bank accommodated rigid
lines of residential segregation by granting mortgages to blacks only
in limited areas of the city. However, Walker challenged Jim Crow by
mobilizing black homeowners to pay poll taxes and support black
candidates for public office, especially black women homeowners
after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Black women used
the St. Luke Bank as a site for developing a political culture. As
Glenda Gilmore has recognized, the intertwined and mutually
reinforcing gender and racial norms of Jim Crow ironically permitted
black women to redefine the political; they transformed the teller
cage and boardroom into sites of activism and resistance.11
The club, church, field, factory floor, and private home were not
the only spaces for women to work out meanings of respectability,
identity, and power. Connections forged among black women at the
St. Luke Bank allowed them to draw from fraternal ritual and
bureaucratic structure to create practical and workable solutions for
assessing creditworthiness and mitigating risks. The money they lent
was often a last resort to protect hard-won assets like homes and
commercial spaces or to maintain hard-fought-for efforts like
completing education or migrating north. St. Luke women also held
both leadership and rank-and-file positions in multiple other
organizations. They were thus able to mobilize support for
movements concerning economic rights and empowerment such as
streetcar boycotts and women’s suffrage. These connections spilled
well beyond the confines of what we might imagine as “legitimate”
financial institutions and “formal” politics. Christmas savings
accounts, loan amounts as small as five dollars, and affordable rents
represent the kinds of banking practices that had real-world—I
daresay, liberatory—potential.
Like many prominent black women who challenged Jim Crow
racial and gender stereotypes, the women connected to the St. Luke
relied on strategies of racial uplift and politics of respectability. They
framed their activities as economic self-help, and they viewed their
role in extending credit to working black women as almost a duty of
their leadership in the black community. Uplift and respectability
were, however, to borrow Erin Chapman’s characterization, “deeply
class-based, ultimately self-defeating strateg[ies] … to combat white
supremacy.”12 Even so, black women’s financial strategies and
choices cannot be understood apart from the imperatives of uplift
and respectability. Capitalism and respectability complicated the
exercise, intention, and direction of black women’s financial
strategies. For example, encouraging wives to be endorsers for their
husbands’ loans acknowledged women’s economic importance to
their families, but it also committed them to repaying debts that they
could not afford if the husband reneged.
Banking on Freedom recovers black women in the histories of
U.S. finance and political economy because their stories illustrate
how race and gender shaped modern capitalism. Black intellectuals
like W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Eric Williams positioned
enslaved people and race formation at the center of their historical
explanations of the rise and development of capitalism, and they
interrogated race in their analyses of configurations of global
capitalism.13 Scholars have extended their analyses of twentieth-
century racial capitalism to examine mortgage redlining, consumer
credit access, actuarial criminology, and social impact bonds. These
works recognize racial exclusion in the development of finance, and
they point to the role of race in destabilizing wealth building in black
communities.14
Too often, however, historians of capitalism miss opportunities to
emphasize gender. The problem is not merely one of locating
women. It is the challenge of articulating the ways in which gender
shapes and is shaped by economic practices and concepts.
Admittedly, the number of black women working in financial
institutions dwarfs the number working in agricultural labor and
domestic service. By the 1920s, St. Luke women stood at the
vanguard of an emerging black white-collar class. Yet the St. Luke
was not an exclusive domain for the elite and aspiring classes.
Thousands of washerwomen, tobacco factory workers, domestics,
teachers, businesswomen, and others held stock certificates,
passbooks, and promissory notes that sustained and made the St.
Luke an essential community—and national—institution. While Jim
Crow placed some limitations on the St. Luke Bank, it relied on
gendered economic practices to push back and shape the bank’s
practices and values around their needs and desires.
In the mid-1850s, Mary Ann Prout, a free black woman in
Baltimore, organized the St. Luke Society in the Bethel African
Methodist Episcopal Church. She intended the St. Luke to be a
society created by women for women and children. St. Luke women
collected dues and raised money to provide for funerals, to support
schools and other community- and church-related institutions, and to
care for the vulnerable and needy. As thousands of African
Americans poured into Baltimore to escape the dislocations of the
Civil War, Prout formally organized the Grand United Order of St.
Luke in 1867 to expand the order and, in part, to capitalize on a new
market. It was also the first time she allowed men to join the order. A
Virginia faction broke off in 1869 and formed the Independent Order
of the Sons and Daughters of St. Luke (IOSL). In the 1880s, the
IOSL experimented with offering modest life insurance policies, but it
struggled to create viable and affordable long-term financial products
in which black communities were willing to trust and invest.
Maggie Lena Walker took over the reins of the IOSL in 1899 as
right worthy grand secretary-treasurer. She shifted the centerpiece of
the order away from social reform and service work and toward
offering financial services, refined the IOSL’s financial products, and
expanded the order in various parts of the country. In 1903, she
organized the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. In the early years of the
twentieth century, the St. Luke Bank experimented with small-scale
consumer lending, much like other banks that catered to working-
class depositors in the period. The bank rejected emerging scientific
assumptions about black deviance and degeneracy; instead, it relied
on the IOSL’s bureaucratic structure and institutional values to
evaluate individuals’ risk and creditworthiness. The St. Luke Bank
faced mounting regulatory and extralegal harassment in the 1910s
and 1920s, which forced it to adopt industry standards and practices.
However, it never completely abandoned its unique practices and
values. And in the years following World War I, the Great Migration
created new challenges to meeting the complex needs of black
women in both northern and southern cities.
Banking on Freedom reveals the ways that black women’s saving,
spending, and lending practices challenge understandings of
success and security, notions of risk, and the possibilities of
citizenship in the U.S. economy and society. The first chapter, “ ‘I Am
Yet Waitin’: African American Women and Free Labor Banking
Experiments in the Emancipation-Era South, 1860s–1900,”
highlights savings experiments created for freedpeople by white
northern reformers and Union military leaders during and after the
Civil War. Freedmen’s funds, military and free labor banks, and the
Freedman’s Bank represented federal versions of racial paternalism
and economic exploitation that undermined much of the economic
autonomy that free black and formerly enslaved women struggled to
carve out in the transformation to free labor. These experiments
interfered with long-standing networks created and utilized by black
women, individually and collectively, to manage their economic
futures. Black women who utilized the free labor banks and the
Freedman’s Bank resisted appeals that privileged male
breadwinners as the proper savers and providers, a model that
actively undercut and ignored the circumstances, needs, and
challenges facing women depositors.
Chapter 2, “ ‘Who Is So Helpless as the Negro Woman?’: The
Independent Order of St. Luke and the Quest for Economic Security,
1856–1902,” chronicles the growth of the IOSL from the mid-
nineteenth century through the opening of the St. Luke Bank in 1903.
In its early years, the IOSL responded to the challenges that tested
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