Maggie Lena Walker

Maggie Lena Draper was born in Richmond, Virginia, on July 15, 1864, during the final months of the Civil War. Her mother, Elizabeth Draper, had been enslaved and worked as an assistant cook in the Van Lew mansion, the home of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union sympathizer who ran a spy network in the Confederate capital. The household was one of the few places in Richmond where a Black child could grow up surrounded by evidence that her life could be something other than what slavery had planned for it.

Her stepfather, William Mitchell, worked as head waiter at the St. Charles Hotel. In 1876, when Maggie was twelve, his body was pulled from the James River. The death was ruled a suicide. The family did not believe it. Her mother, suddenly a widow with two children and no steady income, took in laundry. Maggie walked the clothes to and from white customers across the city through her teenage years.

She attended the Richmond Colored Normal School and graduated in 1883 as part of a ten-student class that staged a protest because Black graduates were being denied the right to hold commencement exercises in a public theater. She taught elementary school for three years, the one professional path then available to an educated Black woman in Richmond.

At fourteen she had joined the Independent Order of Saint Luke, a Black mutual aid society founded in Baltimore in 1867. The Order paid sick benefits, covered burial costs, and pooled small contributions into a larger reserve. It was the kind of institution that Black communities built in the absence of any government willing to insure their lives. She rose through its ranks for two decades.

In 1899, at thirty-five, she was elected Right Worthy Grand Secretary, the executive leadership of the Order. She found it in crisis. Membership had fallen to around a thousand, its treasury held barely three hundred dollars, and it owed more than it had. Over the following three decades she rebuilt it from the inside. By the 1920s the Order counted more than 100,000 members across twenty-four states and owned its own headquarters building in Richmond.

In 1901, at the Order's annual convention, she gave the speech that became its working thesis. "Let us have a bank," she said, "that will take the nickels and turn them into dollars." Two years later she made good on it. On November 2, 1903, the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank opened its doors in Richmond with her as president. She was the first woman of any race to charter and serve as president of a bank in the United States.

The bank operated as an economic engine for Black Richmond. It issued mortgages to families who could not get loans at white banks. It financed small businesses. It accepted deposits as low as a single penny, which meant that a child with a jar of coins could open an account. She later estimated that the bank helped more than six hundred Black families buy homes in Richmond in its first three decades.

In 1905 she launched the St. Luke Emporium, a department store on Broad Street intended to give Black women jobs as clerks and Black families a place to shop with dignity. White Richmond retailers organized a coordinated pressure campaign against its suppliers and the store closed in 1911. She also founded the St. Luke Herald, a weekly newspaper, to give the community its own platform. The Herald ran until 1929.

In 1907 she fell down the front stairs of her home. The injury progressed over the following years into partial paralysis, and by the 1920s she used a wheelchair. She installed an elevator in her home on East Leigh Street, one of the earliest private residential elevators in Richmond, and kept working from an office on its first floor. She led the bank through its 1929 merger with Second Street Savings Bank and Commercial Bank and Trust to form Consolidated Bank and Trust Company and served as chairman of the board until her death.

She died on December 15, 1934, at seventy. Her funeral procession through Richmond drew thousands. Consolidated Bank and Trust kept operating from her original address on Broad Street. It was the oldest continuously operating Black-owned bank in the United States by the time it was finally acquired in 2009.