I would very much like to thank the Gabelli Center for Global Security analysis and our wonderful partners, the museum of American Finance and the cfa society of new york for cosponsoring todays conversation. One of the goals is to shine the light on the importance that history plays in shaping the future. In shennette garrettscotts latest book, banking on freedom, black women in u. S. Finance before the new deal, she explores a period of financial innovation and its Transformative Impact on u. S. Capitalism. Todays session will take place in three parts. First, my colleague and friend president and ceo of the American Museum of finance and we will introduce doctor shennette garrettscott. Then she will discuss her book banking on freedom following this discussion we will facilitate audience questions and we ask you type the questions in the q and a section near the bottom of the screen. Im also excited to share that as a participant of todays webinar will be entered into a raffle to win a free copy of the book banking on freedom. Winners will be notified by the end of the week and finally before i turn it over to do a formal introduction i do want to remind everyone that both the Gabelli School and the museum mm rely on your Financial Support to continue the mission so i encourage you to take some time to think about a donation to both of our outstanding organizations. Now id like to turn it over to david. Thank you. And its great to be back with you the friends that we have it of course the cfa. And our speaker today is a native texan who received her phd at the university of texas and is currently a professor at the university of mississippi. In her research and writing she brings to the floor the issues of race, gender and capitalism. The book has received praise including awards from the organization of american historians, the association of black women historians, the Southern Historical associations southern economic history and was also on the short list for the prize for the best book in Business History in 2020. Now a friend of the museum and former speaker in this series are quote on quote innovative and pathbreaking as well as beautifully written and deeply researched. Given the social climate in the country today, the book is timely to understanding the deepseated issues of inclusion and participation within the Free Enterprise capitalist system. To tell us about banking on freedom and the story who says about herself she wasnt born with a silver spoon in her mouth but rather a Laundry Basket on her head is gabelli. Welcome. Thank you so much, david, for that wonderful introduction and for inviting me and everyone who made this possible. I am going to share my screen and the slide and we will go ahead and get started talking. I appreciate people taking time out of their busy schedules to spend it learning about black womens contribution to u. S. Finance. So, today i will talk for about 35 minutes and i will talk about the world of black finance before the 1929 stock market crash. I focus on one company that is the finance corporation and i will use it to explore how black women use Financial Institutions like the finance corporation that they led and controlled to challenge the constraints of jim crow and economic exploitation. They used Companies Like this to carve out possibilities for themselves in the u. S. Economy and society. They understood the notions and ideas about wealth and value and risk were shaped by gender and race and your place in the economic ladder. But they were not simply defined by these factors and these processes. They took an active role in shaping the moving of wealth and risk and opportunity, and while i certainly acknowledge the limitations they face because of their race and gender and class i also want to demonstrate how black women define their values in ways that often raise counter to the kind of messages they receive about their worth as citizens and economic actors not just in black communities but also the larger u. S. Economy. So we should have a good amount of time left for questions and answers. I think the best way to understand is through two women who were vitally important to the venture thats Charity Jones and Robinson Jones. In the next slide, you will see two images. I only have about three pictures total of those two women, but the women in the images imagest captures their spirit. I will start by imagining their early lives in new york to understand the kind of challenges that black women face and then i will describe the independent order on how the Harlem Branch of the order formed the finance corporation and then i will talk about the successes and the challenges faced, especially the finance corporations board which was comprised totally of women. So lets get started. Charity. Charity hesitated a moment before she stepped onto the dusty dirt street. What am i doing, she thought to herself suspended in the street car door before her old life that lay behind her and this awful new place, the smell, the noise, the people, so many moving, pressing, sweating, buzzing like flies rising from the piles of horsemen newer in the streets. This was 1885 and charity paused for a while for mostly empty streets of the car beckoning. She glanced back and what did she return to, eight dead babies in years all of them taken from her. There was no one there back in virginia. So she drew in her breath and planted her feet. She dared not look back at the tiny handprint. Eight babies calling her back home. Lulu hesitated a moment before she stepped onto the wooden floor slick by hundreds of dancers, black men and with fingers like her selves. The stage like homes of people murmured and pressed tightly together in the hard wooden theater seats. It sounded like a rush of wind. Now this was harlem, 1916 and lulu paused for a moment to suspended between the noisy backstage goingson and expectant audience just to be on the lip of the curtain. She eyed the quiet space at the center of the stage, a pocket she could pour her voice into. So, lulu drew in her breath and planted her feet on the floor. As she stepped into the spotlight, darkness swallowed up the side of the stage where she stood only a moment ago. She dared not look back at the emptiness of that Place Holding on to silence. So, Charity Jones and Lulu Robinson jones was her daughterinlaw had a very different experiences as Migrant Women who moved to new york city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they did share important things in common. Of course the only surviving child, a son. But like hundreds of thousands of other black women, they also left the south to pursue better lives in the north, the chance to earn more money, to escape this humiliating social etiquette and the Sexual Violence of jim crow to find excitement in the big cities of the north. These women also shared a devotion to the independent order of st. Lukes. This was a secret society that was founded in the 1850s by a free black woman. In 1899, the independent order came under the leadership of the ambitious Maggie Walker and from its headquarters in richmond, it would become one of the most successful black controlled and one of the very few largely black women controlled Financial Institutions in the country. At its peak in the mid1920s, the order ram an ran a bank and insurance company, operated a newspaper, it boasted 100,000 members in more than 20 states. It and employed nearly 200 people and the overwhelming majority of young women and it possessed assets that were equivalent to about 31 million in modernday dollars. One important venture that brought the independent order of st. Lukes both renowned and scandal involved Charity Jones and Lulu Robinson jones, and that was the st. Lukes finance corporation headquartered in harlem and organized in the late 19 teens by the new York District of the independent order of st. Lukes. The st. Lukes finance corporation reflects the opportunities that have opened for women in u. S. Finance by the 1920s, so there was a complex tapestry made up of thousands of black controlled Financial Institutions. These included formal banks and Insurance Companies as well as thrift savings clubs, industrial loan associations, Credit Unions and even finance corporations. And this complex tapestry controlled millions of africanamerican dollars and expanded the boundaries of their dreams. But during the great migration around world war i, however, the increasingly urban and northern black population taxed the capacity of these Financial Institutions that have the tapestry as worn in places and the boundaries. So the strategies the st. Lukes Financial Corporation chose to promote reflected some of these anxieties about black womens bodies in these new urban spaces and there were these conflicting tensions that its al saw blacks both the victim but also the source of social disorder both in need of financial protection but also new economic opportunities. So, working womens demands struck these Financial Institutions like the order of st. Lukes. They desired better Career Options and housing choices. They rejected these efforts to their behavior and the way they spend their leisure time. So these would become called new negro women were attracted to the promises of investment as a vehicle for civic inclusion, for Political Rights and as a way to destroy and dismantle jim crow. They also grew tired of these pitches that implied men were the proper producer and consumer of these investment products, these markers of citizenship. The Financial Institutions that were led and controlled experimented with innovative ways to raise capital and they also struggled with and the experience and intractable problems of racial and sexual discrimination, so my book banging on freedobanking on frea number of these but here im going to focus on the rise and fall of the st. Lukes finance corporation. So, it is 1916 and the struggling new York District of st. Lukes which was headquartered in harlem has elected a new president. His name is dennis rice. The harlem st. Lukes had 3. 45 in its coffers but was more than 400 in debt. Now it may have been the former hand at the wheel and Ambitious Group of women controlled the lever so in 1981, 21 members, most of them women, inc. The stn and they set their sights on investments in real estate. So six of the Seven Members of the finance corporations board and Lulu Robinson jones who was widowed by 190 1909 shared the Advisory Committee so the revived harlem st. Lukes turned to Charity Jones to help them recruit new members and Charity Jones solidified her status and was known as the mother of st. Lukes in new york. So through her effort the membership in the new York District sword in the midst of the great migration. Now it wasnt the womens charm alone that fueled the resurgence in the harlem st. Lukes numbers. They are laser focused on addressing the need of black women and lift the spark that revived the order so like i said before, tested and expanded the boundaries of these organizations, they were this model of modern black womanhood and we have scholars that talk about the negro woman and they stress their cultural and political importance, but economic concerns are high among their priorities. These women and their families, they desperately needed jobs and housing. And Robinson Jones understood this dilemma intimately i suspect. In the mid1 mid to 19 teens liy young black women, she likely confronted limited Employment Opportunities as well as the housing traditions of the skyrocketing rent over policing and overcrowding and segregated sections of the city. So, Robinson Jones and the other women of the Advisory Board were able to borrow 3,000 from walker in the Saint Luke Bank in richmond but they were cautious of the finance committee were likely either unwilling to invest more in this real estate or they were just unable to do so because investment in the real estate even then required substantial capital and those capital demands we have to remember were compounded by the racial tariff that made the cost of credit and consideration higher than for whites. So Robinson Jones envisioned this new and returning members as potential investors. An opera singer she also understood the business of leisure in harlem and she arranged the Fundraising Affairs that combined entertainment and enterprise. So for example, she organized this fundraising reception at the manhattan casino and changed a very famous orchestra provided the music. So, in just a few months, the harlem st. Lukes raised enough money to secure a mortgage on a building. It purchased a former convent on west 130th street. In 1921, just a few years later, it bought a second property, a 24 room Apartment Building on west 129th street, and it was called the casanova. In 1922, it remodeled its first acquisition, the former convent on 130th and it transformed it into the st. Lukes hall. It became the new york st. Lukes district headquarters and the st. Lukes spend the equivalent of more than a million dollars, modern dollars, to remodel the st. Lukes hall on 130th. And this hall accommodated everything, all these events in the black community from pageants to Church Groups to International Delegations to union meetings. And in 1924, the order further added to its holdings by purchasing a third property, a combination Apartment Building, restaurant and retail store on west 139th street which wasnt too far. So, st. Lukes three properties stood as these brick, granite and steel monuments to black economic progress located in the heart of harlems black communities and growing black communities, st. Lukes hall became an important center for business, Community Activities and entertainment. The pastor of first imanuel thel Church Called out st. Lukes hall as the place where bootlegging, bold prostitution and cabarets rely its saintly name. Frederick, the pastor of the Salem Episcopal Church and father of the harlem renaissance poet Chelsea Collins called the hall nothing less than one of the hellholes of god. So it was very likely that in the restaurant and the stores and the Office Spaces in st. Lukes hall and its apartments held parties to help make ends meet and they ran numbers games which was a highly profitable lottery gambling game and also very popular. Success in the business of leisure and living it seemed required a foot in both the formal and extralegal economies in harlem. So lets recount. Okay, 1916 the harlem st. Lukes and 1918 they formed the st. Lukes finance corporation and within a few years that Corporation Makes some ambitions and lucrative Real Estate Investments so that by 1929 and a little more than a decade, the new york st. Lukes went from nearly 400 in debt to having more than 5 million and that is a very conservative modernday dollar having 5 million in properties. So as the country led towards the economic decline by the end of the decade, for all of the Corporation Stock left undercapitalized despite the fact that it was generating more than 10,000 in annual profits and that accounts for and equals about 150,000 in modernday dollars they raised from renting the spaces in the hall and apartments in the building and they used the revenues to provide jobs or admittedly a topheavy workforce of nearly two dozen employees but also to fund its public commitment such as providing charitable assistance to nearly 500 harlem families. Let me stretch here for just a moment of these concerns face affordable quality housing for restaurants, retail spaces that offer their prices and a variety of goods and services, good paying stable jobs, respectable and not so respectable amusement and leisure activities these were important priorities for black women in particular and black communities in general. And these were the central social economic and i would add political concerns that animated those women who were leading the st. Lukes finance corporation. So, the district ended up raising the equivalent of about 1. 2 million in modernday dollars from a bond offering. The incredible amount of money they were able to raise highlights the democratization of investing among black communities. Let me say that another way. Demonstrating the ways that investing was popular and accessible fo