Shennette garrettscott. It is a first time joining us, my name is Donna Rapaccioli and had the honor of serving as the dean of the belly school of business. 2020 marks a very special year for our School Tickets are 100 anniversary and were celebrating 100 years of purpose driven his education. Since our inception we believe in the power of partnerships to inform and lead change. I very much like to thank the Global Security analysis and a wonderful partners, the museum of American Finance and the society of new york who are cosponsoring todays conversation. One of the goals of the centennial series is to shine the light on the report history plays in shaping the future. In her latest book, banking on freedom black women in u. S. Finance before the new deal, she explores a rich period a black financial innovation and its Transformative Impact on u. S. Capitalism. Todays session will take place in three parts. First, my colleague and friend david callan, president and ceo of the museum of American Finance will introduce dr. Shennette garrettscott. Then she will discuss her book banking on freedom,. Following this discussion will facilitate audience questions. We ask that you type your questions in the q a section near the bottom of the soon screen. Im also very excited to share that as a participant of todays webinar you will be entered into a raffle to win a free ecopy of the book, banking on freedom. Winners will be notified by the end of the week. And finally it for a turn over to david to do a formal introduction i do want to remind everyone that both the Gabelli School and the museum rely on your support to consider a mission. I encourage you to take some time to think about a donation to both of our outstanding organizations. Now id like to turn over to david. Thanks, donna, its great always to be back with you, the ford infringement and, of course, the cfa. Our speaker today is a a native texan who received her phd at the university of texas. Just really a professor at ole miss, university of mississippi. In a research and writing she brings to the fore the issues of race, gender and capitalism. The Research Behind this book is incredible. There are 400 over 475 detailed footnotes. The book has received much praise including awards from the organization of american historians, the association of black women historians, the Southern Historical associations bennett award for the best book in seven economic history and was also on the short list for the prize for the best business book in history and 2020. A friend at the museum and former speaker in this lecture series are George Robinson about this work it is quoteunquote innovative and pathbreaking as well as quoteunquote beautifully written in carefully researched. Shennette can turn a phrase in that starts right with the dedication which i really like to read. Given the social climate in the country today, this book is timely to understanding about the deepseated issues of inclusion and participation within the Free Enterprise capitalist system. To tell us about making on freedom and the amazing story of Maggie Walker said about herself that she wasnt born with a silver spoon in her mouth but rather a Laundry Basket on her head is shennette garrettscott. Welcome. Thank you so much, david for the wonderful introduction and thank you to Kristen Kristin fr inviting me and for everyone who made this possible. So im going to share my screen and the slides and we will go ahead and get started talking. I also appreciate people taking time out of their busy schedules to spend it learning more 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 in harlem before the 1929 stock market crash. I will focus on one company, thats finance corporation and are use to explore how black women use Financial Institutions like the st. Luke finance corporation institutions that they lead and controlled to challenge the constraints of jim crow, sexism, and economic exploitation. They use Companies Like the as lfc to carve out possibilities for themselves in the u. S. Economy and society. They understood that notions, ideas about wealth and value and risk were shaped by gender and by race and by 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 meaning of wealth and risk and opportunity. While i certainly acknowledge the limitations they faced because of their race and the gender and their class, i also really want to demonstrate how black women defined their values in ways that often ran counter to the kinds of messages that they received about their worth as citizens and its economic actors, not just in black communities but also in the large u. S. Economy. We should have a good amount of time left for questions and answers. The best way to really understand the st. Luke finance corporation is through two women who were vitally important to the venture. Charity jones and Lulu Robinson jones. In the next slide you going to see to make images. They are not charity and lulu. I only have three pictures total of those women but the anonymous women in this images i think captured their spirit. I will start imagining their early lives in new york to understand the kinds of challenges that black women faced, and that i will briefly the independent order of st. Luke, how the Harlem Branch of the order formed the finance corporation, and then i will talk about the successes and the challenges that is faced, especially the finance corporations board which was comprised almost totally of women. Lets get started. Charity. Charity hesitated a moment before she stepped on to the dusty dirt street. What am i doing . She thought to herself, suspended in the street car door between her old life that lay behind her and this awful new place, the smell, the noise, the people. The people, so many moving, pressing, flitting, buzzing now like flies rising from the piles of horsemen who are in the streets. This was 1885 in the heart of the city and charity pause for a while from mostly empty seats of the streetcar beckoning. She glanced back. What did she returned to, eight dead babies in years, all of them taken from her, one can never took to her breast. Another one who managed a few steps. No, there was no bareback in virginia. Charity do in her breath and planted her feet on the unforgiving ground. She dared not look back at the tiny handprint, the babies breath curling off the street car window. Eight dead babies calling her back home. Lulu. Lulu hesitated a moment before she stepped onto the wooden floor, boards slick by hundreds of dancers, black men with even blacker faces, like yourself. The stage homed, people murmured, pressed tightly together in the hard wooden theater seats. They sounded like a rush of wind. Now this was harlem, 1916, and lulu haase for a moment suspended between the noisy backstage goingson and expectant audience just beyond the lip of the thick velvet curtain. She eyed the quite place at the center stage, a pocket she could for her voice into. 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, that no workplace, holding onto silence. So Charity Jones and Lulu Robinson jones, her daughterinlaw, had very different experiences as Migrant Women who moved to new york city in the late 19th and early 20 centuries but he did share some important things in common. They shared charities only surviving child, son. 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 the humiliating social etiquette and the Sexual Violence of jim crow to find excitement in the big cities of the north. These two women also shared a devotion to the independent order of st. Luke. This was a secret society that was founded in the 1850s by a free black woman. In 1899 the independent order of saint luke came under the leadership of the ambitious Maggie Lena Walker, and from its headquarters in richmond, st. Luke 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 19 the mid1920s the order ran a bank and insurance company, operator of a newspaper. It boasted 100,000 members in more than 20 states. It employed nearly 200 people, the over one majority of them women, and it possessed assets that were equivalent to about 31 million in modernday dollars. Now when important venture that brought the independent order of st. Lukes both renowned and scanned involved Charity Jones and Lulu Robinson jones, and that was the st. Luke finance corporation. Headquartered in harlem and organized in the late 19 teens by the new York District independent order of st. Lukes, the st. Luke finance corporation reflects the opportunities that it open for women in u. S. Finance1920s. So there was a complex tapestry made up of thousands, thousan, a black controlled Financial Institutions. These included formal banks and Insurance Companies as well as thrift savings clubs, loan associations, Credit Unions and even finance corporations. This complex tapestry controlled millions of African Americans dollars and it expanded the boundaries of their dreams. But during the great migration, the first great migration around world war i, however, the increasingly urban and northern black population taxed the capacity of the Financial Institutions so the tapestry as frayed and born in places and the boundaries of those dreams fixed. So the strategies, the st. Luke finance corporation chose to promote reflected some of these anxieties about black womens bodies in these new urban spaces. There were these conflicting tensions that some black women as both the victim but also the sources of social disorder, as both in need of financial protection but also new economic opportunities. So the command stretched these Financial Institutions like the independent order of st. Lukes. They decide better Career Options and housing choices. They rejected these efforts to police their behavior and the way they spent their leisure time. These would be 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. But they also grew really tired of these pages that implied that men were the proper producer and consumer of these investment products, these markers of citizenship. So the Financial Institutions that women lead and controlled experimented with innovative ways to raise capital but they also struggled with experience and, of course, the intractable problems of racial and sexual discrimination. My book, banking on freedom, deals with a number of the sorts of tensions but here im going to focus on the rise and the fall of the st. Luke finance corporation. It is 1916 and the struggling new York District of st. Lukes which is 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. Rice may have been the formal hand at the wheel but an Ambitious Group of women controlled the levers. So in 1981, 21 members, most of them women, incorporated the st. Luke finance corporation and they set their sights on investment in real estate. Women made up six of the Seven Members of the finance corporations board, and Lulu Robinson jones who was widowed by 1909 chaired the advisory committee. So the revived new york st. Luke finance corporation turn to charity joan to recruit new members and she solidified her status. She was known as a mother of st. Through our efforts, membership in the new York District sword in the midst of the great migration. It was not the jones womens charm alone that fueled a resurgence in the harlem st. Lukes number. They are laser focused on addressing they need a black women, lit a spark that revived the order. So the new negro women like us to before, tested and expanded the boundaries of these organizations. They were this model of modern black womanhood, and we have scholars the talk about the new negro women and they really stress their cultural and their political importance, but economic concerns really placed high among their priorities. These women and their families desperately needed jobs and housing. And robinsonjones understood this dilemma intimately, i suspect. In the midto late 19 19 teens, like many young black women, she likely confronted limited Employment Opportunities as well squalid housing conditions, of skyrocketing rent, over policing and overcrowding, and segregated section of the city. So robinsonjones and the other women of the Advisory Board were able to borrow 3000 in richmond but the banks very cautious finance committee was likely is unwilling to invest more in this real estate scheme but it just unable to do so. Because investment in new York Real Estate even then required substantial capital, and those capital demands we have to remember were compounded by the racial tariffs that made the cost of credit and consideration higher for blacks than it was for whites. So robinsonjones envision distant 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 change reece europe famous orchestra provided the music. In just a few months, the harlem st. Lukes raised enough money to secure a mortgage on a building. It purchased the former convent on west 100 30th 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. Maybe is what they called it. In 1922 it remodeled its first acquisition that former convent and 100 30th and to transform it into the st. Luke hall. It became the new york st. Luke district headquarters. The harlem st. Lukes equivalent of more than a Million Dollars in modern dollars, to remodel the st. Luke call on 100 30th. Its a gleaming hall accommodated everything, all these events in the black community from pageants to Church Groups to international delegation, to union meetings. And in 1924 the order further added to its holdings by purchasing a third property, a combination Apartment Building, restaurant, retail store on w. 139th st. , ninth street, which wasnt too far from skies are shrill. So st. Lukes three properties stood as these brick, granite and steel monument to black economic progress located in the heart of harlem is black communities burgeoning rolling a black communities. St. Lukes became an important center for business, for Community Activities and entertainment, and for the pastor First Emmanuel Church called out st. Luke call and the place was bootlegging, bold prostitution and cabarets belie its saintly name. And frederick, the pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church and the adoptive father of harlem renaissance poet called st. Luke call nothing less than one of the quote hellholes of god. It was very likely that in the restaurant, the stores and Office Spaces in st. Lukes all and its apartments held great parties to help make ends meet and the rain numbers games, which was extralegal but highly profitable lottery gambling game. Game. And its also very popular. Success in the business of leisure and living a scene required in both the form and the extralegal economies in harlem. In 1916 the heart of a st. Lukes is broke. In 1918 they form the st. Luke finance corporation. Within a few years, that Corporation Makes some ambitious and lucrative real estate investment, so that by 1929 in a little more than a decade, the new york st. Lukes went from being nearly 400 in debt to having more than 5 million, and that is a very conservative modern day dollars, having 5 million in properties. As the country slid towards economic decline by the end of the decade, for its failures to sell all the stock, left at undercapitalized, despite the fact it was generating more than 10,000 in annual profits, and that accounts come that equals about 150,000 in modern day dollars but they raise from reaching the spaces in the hall and the apartments in the building, and they used those revenues to provide jobs for admittedly hoppity workforce of nearly two dozen employees but also to fund its public commitment such as providing charitable assistance to nearly 500 harlem families. Let