Your own community will support you if you can satisfy them
Maggie Lena Mitchell Walker had an inauspicious birth. Her mother, Elizabeth Draper, was born a slave, but managed to join war spy Elizabeth Van Lew.
Van Lew was an operator of the Underground Railroad. She hid and employed freed blacks on her property, allowing them to matriculate and derive independence by running their own businesses.
Maggie’s mother ran a laundry business. Her father was a white abolitionist and writer/reporter (for a New York newspaper) called Eccles Cuthbert. Sex between the blacks and whites was illegal, and marriage was a hanging offence. Eccles Cuthbert left Lena when she was pregnant with Margaret. William Mitchell, a butler at the Van Lew place, married Elizabeth when Maggie was four years old.
However, before Maggie was ten years old her stepfather was lynched and dumped in the James River. His sudden death left his wife and children (Maggie by now had a brother – Jonnie Mitchell) with no savings. It was all hands to the pump.
Maggie eventually became a Sunday-school teacher in her early teens, and joined an African-American fraternal and cooperative insurance society. Founded by a former slave woman, its primary function was to pool funds to ensure black people could fund medical care and get a decent burial. She graduated with honours from school aged sixteen. She organised a successful protest against segregation, resulting in African Americans receiving their diplomas with the same pomp and ceremony as their white counterparts and in the same auditorium. Whilst she taught at her former school, she worked for the Women’s Union as a part-time insurance sales agent, studying bookkeeping and business at night school. She was forced to quit in 1886 when she married Armstead Walker Jr, a contractor who worked for his father. Married women weren’t allowed to teach, nor vote or be elected to public office for that matter.
However, the girl was made of steel and was a rising star. In 1899, the Grand United Order of St. Luke held its convention, electing Maggie Walker (now aged twenty-five) as “Right Worthy Grand Secretary-Treasurer” on $100 ($1900) a year. It’s the top spot. The organisation was almost on its last legs with unpaid bills, despite its 3000 paid-up membership. The young lioness go-getter got down to business, launching a newspaper, gathering high-flyers and brains within the order as a think-tank and looked into banking as a tool for the black community. During this time she was having children, dealing with the death of one of them, contending with racially motivated supplier boycotts and the death of her only sibling Johnnie.
Maggie walker was part of this renaissance occurring within the African American community. She believed that ordinary people could turn “nickels into dollars.” The great orator once announced at a big convention, “let us put our money together, let us use our money, let us put our money out at usury among ourselves and reap the benefit for ourselves.”
By 1903 the former needy child who worked with her overburdened mother is a long and distant memory. The illegitimate daughter of a slave became the first American woman to launch a bank. The St. Luke Penny Savings Bank opened on November 2nd 1903. Her dream of a black-owned, black-run community bank was complete
By 1904 Maggie had her own 25 bedroom, centrally heated mansion, replete with gilded mirrors, chandeliers, a library and electric lighting. She made a brave but powerful move via her bank buying 600 houses in 1920. Her business was now a conglomerate featuring banking (as its core competency), publishing, insurance, property and a department store. The bank’s corporate culture was philanthropic and Maggie used it to rescue the city’s public school system. She oversaw a merger with two other banks and was inaugurated as chairperson.
Her death on December 15th 1934 was headlines news in the region. The streets were lined with thousands of schoolchildren as her coffin was slowly driven by.
By Ron Shabazz Shillingford
Author of : The History of the World’s Greatest Entrepreneurs
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