124. Ibid., 354.
125. U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on the Freedmen’s Bank, H.R. Rep. 44-502 (1876), II.
126. Douglass, Life and Times, 355-356.
127. U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on the Freedmen’s Bank, H.R. Rep. 44-502 (1876).
128. “[H]alf the depositors [in the Freedmen’s Bank] received compensation—an average of $18.51 per person, or about three-fifths the value of their accounts." Foner, Reconstruction, 532.
129. Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 52.
130. Report of the Select Committee to Investigate Freedmen’s Savings & Trust Co., 52.
131. Robert H. Kinzer and Edward Sagarin, The Negro in American Business: The Conflict Between Separatism and Integration (New York: Greenburg, 1950), 63-64.
132. Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 54.
133. Seder and Burrell, Getting It Together, 9.
134. Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 54.
135. Ibid., 85.
136. Seder and Burrell, Getting It Together, 9.
137. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 37.
138. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 45.
139. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis 22-24 (May 1921): 253.
140. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 38. “The spirit of business enterprise which had been implanted among Negroes by the Freedmen’s Savings Bank began to blossom forth within fifteen years after the failure of that institution. Beginning in 1888, Negroes organized at least 134 banks between that year and 1934."
141. Douglass, Life and Times, 292.
142. Ibid., 293.
143. By 1900 more than three-quarters of the former plantations were being cultivated by sharecroppers. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 285.
144. Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 45.
145. Charles Lewis Nier III, “The Shadow of Credit: The Historical Origins of Racial Predatory Lending and Its Impact upon African American Wealth Accumulation,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change 11 (2007-2008): 131.
146. Conley, Being Black, 34.
147. Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1997), 50. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, 272-273.
148. A typical interest rate was 50-70 percent. Ferrell, Reconstruction, 175; Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 89.
149. Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 146. See also Levy, Freaks of Fortune, 136.
150. According to Beckert, “Few observers in 1865 had expected such a spectacularly successful transition away from slavery and toward new systems of labor—a transition that filled with hope the hearts of imperial statesmen and metropolitan cotton manufacturers the world over.” Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 291.
151. Ibid., 292. “Reconstruction resulted in a rapid, vast, and permanent increase in the production of cotton for world markets . . . by 1870 their total production surpassed their previous high, set in 1860, and by 1880, the U.S. was exporting more than it had in 1860. By 1891, the U.S. was exporting twice as much cotton as any year pre-slavery.”
152. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 90-91. Du Bois, writing in 1906, explained that the “direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant. The currency of the Black Belt is cotton. . . . There is no use asking the black tenant, then, to diversify his crops—he cannot under this system.”
153. William Garrott Brown, The New Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914), 248.
154. Richard F. Bensel, Passion and Preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 Democratic Convention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1-3.
155. Encyclopedia of Populism in America: A Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Alexandra Kindell and Elizabeth S. Demers (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2014), 521. The Republicans had always held the allegiance of blacks, though they had not fought for their economic interests. Frederick Douglass had articulated the political position for a generation of blacks: “The Republican Party is the Ship. All else is the open sea.” The southern Democrats were the party of the Confederacy and white supremacy. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 107.
156. Marion Butler, a former member of the Farmers Alliance and senator from North Carolina from 1895 to 1901, left the Democratic Party to become the chairman of the Populist Party because of the Democratic Party’s racism. Butler argued that “white race-baiting to sustain monopoly was a crime” and that people who stirred up racial tensions and deflected attention from greater economic reforms were the “most dangerous elements of society.” He declared white supremacy “unpopulist” and was one of the foremost proponents of postal banking as a means to provide banking services to poor black and white southerners. James L. Hunt, Marion Butler and American Populism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 134.
157. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 61.
158. Ibid., 63 When a black Populist was threatened with lynching, Watson called on
2,000 armed men to remain on guard for two nights to protect the party member from angry white mobs. The 1896 Georgia Populist Party platform denounced lynching.
159. Ibid., 63. H. S. P Ashby, quoted in the Dallas Morning News, August 18, 1891.
160. Political economist Victor Perlo explained that this “represented a high point of an approach in industrial unionism and of black-white labor unity." Indeed, just decades later, the progressive labor coalition viewed black workers as the enemy. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 31.
161. Frederick Douglass, Statement to President Andrew Johnson, February 7, 1866.
162. Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 81.
163. Ibid., 82-83.
164. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 287.
165. Larry J. Sabato and Howard R. Ernst, Encyclopedia of American Political Parties and Elections (New York: Facts on File, 2007), 483.
166. As Frederick Douglass lamented, “in most of the Southern States, the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments are virtually nullified. . . . The citizenship granted in the fourteenth amendment is practically a mockery, and the right to vote . . . is literally stamped out in face of government." Douglass, Life and Times, 611.
167. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 142. Indeed, according to Frazier, a “studied campaign was carried on to prove that the Negro was subhuman, morally degenerate and incapable of being educated."
168. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951), 159.
169. RayfordW. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought (NewYork: Dial Press, 1925), 90.
170. William A. Sinclair, The Aftermath of Slavery (Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1905), 216.
171. Roy L. Brooks, When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 403.
172. Emphasis added. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).
173. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Broadway Books, 2016), 41.
174. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873); United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1876); United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875); Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Ry. Co. v. Mississippi, 133 U.S. 587 (1890).
175. Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898); Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 (1896).
176. Foner, Reconstruction, 529-530.
177. Alexander Tsesis, The Promise of Liberty: The History and Contemporary Relevance of the Thirteenth Amendment (New York: Columbia University Press,
2010), 80.
178. Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 98, 118.
179. The Jim Crow South was “an all-absorbing autocracy of race, an animus of aggrandizement which makes, in the imagination of the white man, an absolute identification of the
stronger race with the very being of the state." Edgar G. Murphy, The Basis of Ascendancy: A Discussion of Certain Principles of Public Policy Involved in the Development of the Southern States (New York: Longmans, Green, 1910), 30.
180. Du Bois explained that the South’s “police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police." Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 107-108. The southern press played up the threat of black crime to justify swift and cruel punishment for any breach. E. Franklin Frazier claimed that a black person’s “picture was never carried in the newspapers of the South . . . unless he had committed a crime." Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 144.
181. “Strange Fruit," Billie Holiday and Abel Meeropol, 1937, http://www.npr.org /2012/09/05/158933012/the-strange-story-of-the-man-behind-strange-fruit.
1. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015).
2. According to Carter Woodson, “the freedman practically monopolized the celebration of holidays throughout the South during the reconstruction period." John Henry Harmon Jr., Arnett G. Lindsay, and Carter G. Woodson, The Negro as a Business Man (College Park, MD: McGrath, 1969), 89-90. For early mutual aid societies, see John Sibley Butler, Entrepreneurship and Self-Help among Black Americans: A Reconsideration of Race and Economics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 47-48; Juliet E. K. Walker, The History ofBlack Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 111-112.
3. Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 87. Carter Woodson explains, “Wherever Negroes had their own churches benevolence developed as a handmaiden of religion."
4. Historian John Butler explained that “the promoters of these various companies had no experience whatever in insurance, and it never occurred to them that all successful insurance is based on some well-established mortality table. . . . The woods are full of the graves of these earlier companies which failed for the want of knowledge of business." Butler, Entrepreneurship and Self-Help, 118.
5. Christie Ford Chapin, “ ‘Going Behind with That Fifteen Cent Policy’: Black-Owned Insurance Companies and the State," Journal of Policy History 24(4) (2012): 649.
6. The state of Virginia granted True Reformers a charter with permission to engage in typical banking activities, such as lending on personal and real property and exchanging notes and currency, as well as investing in securities, bonds, and other commercial paper. Its charter was clear that the purpose of the bank was to safeguard the deposits of the Order’s members. “The object of this corporation is to provide a depository for the Grand and Subordinate Fountains of the United Order of True Reformers, a benevolent institution incorporated for such purposes by the Circuit Court of the State of Virginia." Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 57-58.
7. Ibid., 58.
8. Ibid., 60-61; letter from W. H. Grant to W. W. Browne, date unknown.
9. Ibid., 95. Abram L. Harris, The Negro as Capitalist: A Study of Banking and Business among American Negroes (New York: Haskell House, 1936), 63, 73; E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997), 41n36.
10. Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 39.
11. NNBL Minutes, 1926, 1927.
12. The first woman to own a bank in the United States was Anna Henriette Mebus Martin; Deborah S. Large, “Martin, Anna Henriette Mebus," http://www .tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fmaax.
13. Museum Collections, National Park Service, Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site, Virginia, https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/Maggie_Walker/index .html: Determined Spirit, https://www.nps.gov/mawa/index.htm; Gertrude Woodruff Marlowe, A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 2003), 1-30.
14. After the failure of the other Richmond fraternal bank, True Reformers, the state of Virginia changed the rules that applied to banks linked with fraternal orders and forced a separation between fraternal societies and their banks as an effort to promote sound banking; Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 63.
15. Marlowe, Right Worthy Grand Mission, 56.
16. Ibid.
17. National Park Service, Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site, Virginia, “The St. Luke Penny Savings Bank," https://www.nps.gov/mawa/the-st-luke-penny -savings-bank.htm. Marlowe, Right Worthy Grand Mission, 91.
18. Maggie L. Walker, A Testimonial of Love Tendered Mrs. Maggie L. Walker: 25 Years of Service (Richmond, VA: St. Luke Press, 1925).
19. National Park Service, “St. Luke Penny Savings Bank."
20. Consolidated was merged into Premier Bank in 2010 when it suffered severe losses, and is no longer considered a black-owned bank. Michael Schwartz, “Bank’s Heritage Consolidated into the History Books," University of Richmond, September 2, 2010, http://www.richmondbizsense.com/2010/09/02/banks -heritage-consolidated-into-the-history-books/.
21. Arnett G. Lindsay, “The Negro in Banking," Journal of Negro History 14(2) (April, 1929): 179. The bank’s directors were Robert H. Terrell, Whitfield McKinley, W. S. Montgomery, John A. Pierre, J. R. Wilder, and Henry Baker; they raised $6,000 of capital to start the bank. Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 54, 64, 85.
22. Ibid., 85, 55. As described by Lindsay, the main reasons for the failure were: “Long time and unprofitable commercial loans, bringing about frozen assets; financing speculative schemes of officers." Earl Louis Brown “Negro Banks in the United States" (M.A. thesis, Boston University, 1930), 15, https://archive.org/stream /negrobanksinunit00brow/negrobanksinunit00brow_djvu.txt.https://archive .org/stream/negrobanksinunit00brow/negrobanksinunit00brow_djvu.txt.
23. Richard S. Grossman, Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
24. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 46. The same year, the Mutual Trust Company in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was formed. The Chattanooga bank was short-lived, failing in 1893. Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 57; Butler, Entrepreneurship and Self-Help, 132-133, table 3.23.
25. Booker T. Washington, The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 5: 1899-1900, ed. Louis R. Harlan, Raymond W. Smock, and Barbara S. Kraft (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 393.
26. Washington, Papers, vol. 5, 393.
27. Jefferson County Historical Commission, Birmingham and Jefferson County, Alabama (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 1998); Washington, Papers, vol. 5, 393.
28. Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 56.
29. N. B. Young Sr., Interview, February 20, 1929.
30. Carol Jenkins and Elizabeth Gardner Hines, Black Titan: A. G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire (New York: Random House, 2004).
31. James Baldwin, Baldwin’s Collected Essays: The Harlem Ghetto, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 43.
32. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994), 30.
33. Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Compromise Speech," http://historymatters .gmu.edu/d/39/, as found in Washington, Papers, vol. 3, ed. Louis R. Harlan (Ur-bana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 583-587.
34. His probusiness stance was not without criticism, but usually by Marxist thinkers before the civil rights movement, such as E. Franklin Frazier. Black radicals reviled Washington while themselves pushing for black business growth. For a modern debate on Washington’s legacy, see Rebecca Carroll, Uncle Tom or New Negro: African Americans Reflect on Booker T. Washington and Up from Slavery 100 Years Later (New York: Harlem Moon / Broadway Books), 107.
35. Washington’s placatory message to blacks facing discrimination and hostility in the South was to befriend, not fight, the white community. To blacks itching to leave the South, he exhorted, “to those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land," he pleaded, “cast down your bucket where you are.
Cast it down, making fr
iends in every manly way of the people of all races, by whom you are surrounded." Washington, “Atlanta Compromise Speech."
36. In Washington’s famous 1895 message to black leaders in Atlanta, he said of the two races, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1901), 112.
37. Du Bois even accused Washington of being a leader created by northern Republicans and southern Whites because his message demanded nothing from either side. E. Franklin Frazier claimed that it was his acceptance of the subordination of blacks that caused “northern industrialists [to accept] Washington as the spokesman of Negroes and as the arbiter in the distribution of funds for Negro education." Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 67.
38. Andrew Carnegie, The Negro in America: An Address Delivered before the Institute of Edinburgh (Cheyney, PA: Committee of Twelve), 22, https://archive.org / stream /negroinamericaad00carn#page/22/ mode /2up/ search /free+and +unrestricted.
39. Quote from William Dean Howells “An Exemplary Citizen," North American Review 173 (1901): 287.
40. Booker T. Washington, Black Belt Diamonds: Gems from the Speeches, Addresses, and Talks to Students of Booker T. Washington (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2011), 91-92; Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 76; Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 46.
41. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 76; Washington, Black Belt Diamonds, 91-92.
42. Wealth and its attendant power would lead blacks toward “the enjoyment of all his rights." E. L. Thornbrough, ed., Booker T. Washington (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 44.
43. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1865-1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 269.
44. Thomas Dixon, Saturday Evening Post, August 19, 1905. Washington was not “training Negroes to take their place in any industrial system of the South in which the white man can direct or control him."
45. Washington, Up from Slavery, 40.
46. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 41-60. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2011),
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