Shennette Garrett-Scott’s innovative and path-breaking book, Banking on Freedom, traces the histories of black women who created and managed financial organizations—such as burial and mutual aid societies, savings banks, and insurance companies—as well as the women who invested in these institutions. Garrett-Scott convincingly demonstrates that “black women used finance to carve out possibilities in society and the economy” (195), even as the American capitalist system as a whole marginalized them. From the 1880s to the 1920s, black Americans founded more than one hundred banks and thousands of insurance companies, many of them growing out of fraternal organizations. Banking on Freedom illuminates this era of African American financial empowerment by focusing on the career of Maggie Lena Walker (1867–1934), head of the Independent Order of St. Luke insurance business and the St. Luke Bank, in Richmond, Virginia.

There is a scant historiography concerning African Americans and finance, from Abram Harris’s pioneering The Negro as Capitalist (1936) to Angel Kwolek-Folland’s more recent “The African American Financial Industries” (1994),Footnote ¹ and very little of this work concerns the role of black women as investors or financiers. Although a key financial player, Maggie Lena Walker has also been woefully neglected by historians. Apart from a few articles and a rather idiosyncratic biography by Gertrude Woodruff Marlowe, A Right Worthy Grand Mission,Footnote ² Walker has only now received the attention she deserves with Garrett-Scott’s fine work.

Banking on Freedom situates Walker’s story within the larger framework of African Americans’ often fraught interactions with American finance. The book’s first chapter examines the failure of the Freedman’s Bank in 1874 (due to the incompetence of white managers) and the determined efforts of black women depositors to gain restitution. The final chapter details ambitious attempts by “New Negro” leaders like Marcus Garvey and Emmet J. Scott to raise capital for black businesses through new companies such as the United Negro Improvement Association and the Allied Industrial Finance Corporation. The central chapters are devoted to Maggie Lena Walker’s remarkable achievements.

In 1899 a thirty-two-year-old Walker assumed leadership of the Richmond-based Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL), an African American fraternal order that sold insurance benefits. The IOSL had been founded in Baltimore in 1856 by Mary Ann Prout, a free black woman, to provide sickness and death benefits for black women and children. The IOSL spread by establishing councils in Maryland and Virginia, but, over the decades, divisions and poor management nearly bankrupted the society. Walker, who had risen rapidly through the ranks of the order as an efficient organizer, reinvigorated the organization by focusing on black economic self-help and the needs of women. She concentrated on building up the insurance business of the order and expanding membership by creating new councils outside Virginia, especially north with the Great Migration to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. In 1903 she created the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank to manage the order’s money, to raise new funds, and to loan money to African Americans ill-served by white-owned banks. Walker was the first African American woman to head an American bank, and, at the time, was the only female bank president in the United States.

In all her endeavors, Walker relied primarily on other black women. Most of the officers of the IOSL as well as a majority of the bank’s employees were women. The bank’s primary customers and shareholders were also women. Walker’s determination to “take nickels and turn them into dollars” (73) demonstrated her commitment to serve poor and working-class women such as laundresses, domestics, dressmakers, and factory workers. Tailoring its services for its customer base, the St. Luke Bank allowed small loans and made quick loan decisions, sometimes as fast as twenty-four hours. Walker and her coworkers sought to increase financial literacy among black women while offering them new insurance and banking services as alternatives to risky and expensive forms of credit—including pawn shops, loan sharks, and salary lenders—on which African Americans typically depended.

Garrett-Scott also demonstrates how the St. Luke insurance and banking businesses built on black women’s church networks and lodge organizations. By pooling many small contributions, these women raised necessary capital for businesses as well as for charities. Bank officers could also utilize intimate knowledge of fellow lodge members, who comprised the bulk of the bank’s customers, to determine credit worthiness. Failure to repay a loan was not merely a business fault but also a betrayal of one’s fellow initiates in the Order of St. Luke. As Garrett-Scott concludes: “The bank embedded racial and gendered practices onto standard banking practice to assert a distinct ‘black women’s way’ of banking and managing risk” (123).

A beautifully written and deeply researched book, Banking on Freedom puts African American women in the center of financial history. My only criticism of the book is that it is too short. I long to know more about many issues only briefly addressed, such as Walker’s personal life, the esoteric rituals of the IOSL, and the biographies of the many intrepid women who established hundreds of local St. Luke councils around the country. That the book inspires such curiosity is of course one of its strengths. Another is its expansive vision in identifying many topics for future research.