The Harlem of the South
Near Richmond, Virginia
Just north of downtown Richmond, Virginia, sits a neighborhood that once stood as the most concentrated expression of Black economic power in the American South. In the decades after the Civil War, Jackson Ward grew into a self-sustaining world that outsiders called the Harlem of the South, and its residents called home.
Freed people poured into Richmond after emancipation, and many settled in Jackson Ward. By the turn of the twentieth century the neighborhood was alive with Black-owned insurance companies, banks, restaurants, theaters, and social clubs. At its peak it housed more than one hundred African American-owned businesses and all six chartered Black banks in the city.
The most remarkable of those institutions was the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank, founded in nineteen oh three by Maggie Lena Walker, who became the first African American woman to found and serve as president of an American bank. Walker was the daughter of an enslaved woman, and she turned a small mutual benefit society into a financial anchor for the community. Her house on Leigh Street is now a National Historic Site.
Along Second Street, called The Deuce, the Hippodrome Theater hosted virtually every major Black entertainer of the twentieth century: Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, and Nat King Cole all performed there on the Chitlin' Circuit. And the neighborhood produced one of its own legends: Bill Bojangles Robinson, born in Jackson Ward in eighteen seventy-eight, who became the greatest tap dancer of his era and the first Black performer to headline a mainstream white Broadway production.
Urban renewal in the nineteen fifties and sixties cut the neighborhood in half when Interstate Ninety-Five was routed directly through it, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses. Jackson Ward never fully recovered economically. But its legacy as the birthplace of Black capitalism in America is preserved, and a new generation of Black entrepreneurs has returned to the streets where Maggie Walker built her bank.
