Maggie Lena Walker triumphed in the Jim Crow era

More than a century ago, Maggie Lena Walker made history as the first African American woman to charter a bank. The speech she made announcing her vision for the institution would resonate with many professionals in wealth management and other financial services today.

"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," she said. It was August 1901 in Richmond, Virginia, at the annual council of the Independent Order of St. Luke, a Christian benevolent society she joined as a teenager and later ran for decades as the grand secretary.

Walker turned the group around: Under her leadership, it went from near ruin to reaching 100,000 members in 24 states. At a time when Jim Crow laws were removing Black Americans' civil rights, Walker pursued a three-pronged strategy that leveraged entrepreneurship as a means to uplift Black Americans. The order launched a bank, the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank; a newspaper, the St. Luke Herald; and a retail store, the St. Luke Emporium. 

Walker's career provides an example of a legendary figure known just as much for her outspoken activism as for her pragmatism in working for change within the economic system.

When she died at 70 years old in 1934, Monument Avenue in her hometown of Richmond, was paying tribute to Confederate generals in one of the most prominent examples of the "Lost Cause" movement. Those statues no longer appear on the avenue But Walker's home on Richmond's East Leigh Street is a national historic site, and  statues of her can be found in the city's Jackson Ward neighborhood and as well as in the Virginia State Capitol.

"Her work and mission are rooted in this activism that changed her community. It changed the way we think about banking," Chloe McKenzie, the founder of a nonprofit organization devoted to closing the racial and gender-based wealth gap, BlackFem, said in a 2020 documentary about Walker's life for the PBS series, "American Masters."

As the daughter of a formerly enslaved woman, Walker navigated tragedy, financial hardship and health problems on the way to her many achievements. She lost her father when she was 12 years old in a mysterious suicide that may have been a murder and helped her impoverished mother start and run a laundry business. Much later, her son shot and killed her husband when he thought an intruder had entered their home late at night. She also operated from a wheelchair during the last decade of her life due to diabetes.

Yet Walker overcame those struggles, emerging as one of the initiators of a 1904 boycott of segregated Richmond streetcars, the founder of local chapters of the NAACP and the Council of Colored Women and a strong voice for women's suffrage. After the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, Walker led long lines of Black women to register to vote.  

The St. Luke Penny Savings Bank opened in 1903. Within 17 years it had financed more than 600 mortgages to Jackson Ward residents. While other banks failed at the onset of the Great Depression, Walker merged the Penny Savings Bank with two other Black-owned institutions to create The Consolidated Bank and Trust Company. She was the chair of its board until her death. That bank operated on a standalone basis until 2005, when it merged into a larger institution.

Monuments in Richmond, schools named for Walker there and in Brooklyn, New York, and streets labeled in her honor in Virginia's capital city and in Newport News serve as reminders of Walker's legacy. The FDIC has referred to her as "America's National Treasure in Banking," and Paypal created the Maggie Lena Walker Award, which "recognizes and promotes the achievements of women who have charted new paths in their industries, demonstrated a commitment to economically empowering those in their communities and are ultimately creating a more inclusive, dynamic, and equal world." 

The opening of an article about her from the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History may have summed up her story best.

"Maggie Lena Walker was one of the most important Black businesswomen in the nation, and today too few people have heard of her," author Crystal Marie Moten wrote.

Read the other stories in this series: 

• Legendary role models whose achievements laid the foundation
• How LeCount Davis, history's first Black CFP, is still giving back
• June Middleton made history on Wall Street, then left the industry
• Stanley O'Neal's rise to top of Merrill was against all odds
• Gerald B. Smith blazed a trail in bonds