Garrett-Scott, Shennette

OUR SYNOPSIS: Shennette Garrett-Scott focuses on trailblazing bank leader Maggie Lena Walker’s St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia, to tell the stories of “black women who created webs of formal and informal banking and savings institutions from the eve of the Civil War to the New Deal.” (3) She shows that “Financial institutions and practices represented a terrain upon which black women worked out familial and community strategies to achieve economic and social justice under the Jim Crow system of racial apartheid—even as those same institutions and practices constrained their vision of what constituted justice.” (4) The St. Luke Bank became the center of a political economy built by and around Black women. Before this, the Freedman’s Bank and related institutions directly undercut Black women’s financial interests through racialized patriarchal structuring. By contrast, the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL), which Walker’s bank eventually grew out of, provided Black women with some economic security and autonomy starting in the mid-nineteenth century. As leader of the IOSL’s Right Worthy Grand (RWG) Council starting in 1899, Walker led the revitalization of the organization. By 1903, she opened the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. Women made up the majority of its business from the start. This bank gave Black women relatively fair access to consumer credit, which they were denied through other channels due to racism and sexism. Greater financial opportunities opened for Black women by the 1920s, but structural barriers continued to greatly restrict their economic security.