Maggie Lena Walker: First to Charter a Bank
Near Richmond, Virginia
The house on East Leigh Street in Jackson Ward is a two-and-a-half-story brick building that looks solid and purposeful, which is an accurate description of the woman who lived in it. Maggie Lena Walker was born in Richmond in eighteen sixty-four, the daughter of a formerly enslaved woman named Elizabeth Draper, who worked as a cook in the household of a Confederate-era abolitionist named Elizabeth Van Lew. Maggie grew up near the First African Baptist Church in a neighborhood where Black civic life organized itself with remarkable energy.
She attended the Richmond Colored Normal School, graduating in eighteen eighty-three. After three years of teaching, she married a brick contractor named Armstead Walker and, following school policy, had to leave her job. She turned instead to the Independent Order of St.
Luke, a fraternal organization originally founded in Baltimore as a burial society, which she had joined at fourteen. She worked her way through every level of the organization and became its Right Worthy Grand Secretary in eighteen ninety-nine. When she arrived, the Order was nearly bankrupt from financial mismanagement.
Within a year she had doubled its membership. Walker understood that economic power was inseparable from civic power. In nineteen oh three, she chartered the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond's Jackson Ward neighborhood.
She became its first president. In doing so, she became the first Black woman in the United States to charter a bank and serve as its president. The bank gave children in Jackson Ward cardboard boxes for saving pennies and let them open accounts when they had accumulated a dollar.
By nineteen twenty, Walker could demonstrate that the bank had helped six hundred forty-five Black families completely pay off their homes. She published a newspaper for the Order, the Saint Luke Herald. She organized cooperative buying programs.
She co-founded the Richmond NAACP branch. She helped register Black women to vote after the Nineteenth Amendment passed. Maggie Walker died in nineteen thirty-four.
The bank she founded merged over the decades and eventually became the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, the oldest continuously operating Black-owned bank in the United States. Her house on East Leigh Street is a National Park Service historic site.
