S1 • E3 Mar 18, 2020 9m
Maggie Lena Walker (1864-1934), born in Richmond, VA in the final years of the Civil War, became the first African American female bank president in the United States when she founded the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in 1903. At a time when white-owned banks did not accept deposits from Black customers, Walker not only grew her bank, but expanded the economic base of the African American community in Richmond by hiring and training Black women workers, and financing over 600 mortgages for Black families by 1920. Walker also founded a newspaper where she served as its managing editor, and opened a department store tailored to African American customers. A civil rights activist, she organized the first Richmond branch of the NAACP and served as its vice president and board member, led a city-wide boycott against segregated streetcars over 50 years before the Montgomery bus boycott, and promoted women's suffrage and voter registration drives. Interviewees: biographer Muriel Miller Branch, co-author of Pennies to Dollars: The Story of Maggie Lena Walker and former president of the Maggie L. Walker Historical Foundation; Walker's great-great- granddaughter Eliza Walker Mickens; wealth justice activist Chloe McKenzie, CEO of BlackFem and On a Wealth Kick.
