The first Black woman to charter a bank in the United States was more than just an entrepreneur.

Beyond her work as a business-owner, Maggie Lena Walker was a pillar of Richmond’s Black community from the 1880s until her death in 1934. She helped put Richmond on the map, in front of the backdrop of the booming economic center and birthplace of Black capitalism that was Jackson Ward in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

She was instrumental in the success of the Independent Order of St. Luke, which was devoted to ensuring economic independence for Black Americans. She began her own publication, the St. Luke Herald, to speak up against Jim Crow policies in the South. She went head-to-head with white store owners and pro-Jim Crow publications.

She ran for state office in 1921, just a year after women were granted the right to vote in the United States. She was invited to the White House by three sitting U.S. presidents and survived insurmountable tragedy throughout her life.

160 years after Maggie L. Walker’s birth, her legacy and impact, and those of the countless Black Richmonders who were at the forefront of Black progress, live on.

Celebrations for her 160th birthday will take place in Jackson Ward in the weeks around her birthday.

Walker's early life

Walker was born in the twilight of the Civil War, on July 15, 1864.

Her mother was Elizabeth Draper, a Black woman born into slavery in the household of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Richmond aristocrat who served as a Union spy during the Civil War. Van Lew inherited Draper when her father died, and although being a staunch abolitionist, was unable to free any enslaved person she owned due to a stipulation in her father’s will. Instead, Van Lew paid all people in her employ until they were able to gain freedom after the end of the war, including Draper, who worked as a laundress.

"I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but a clothes basket almost upon my head," Walker said in a 1907 speech.

Walker’s biological father was a white man who immigrated from Ireland and fought for the Confederacy during the war. He didn’t play a role in Walker’s life.

The circumstances of her birth are a microcosm of things that “defined the country” during the Civil War, according to Ben Anderson, a National Park Service ranger who works at the Maggie L. Walker Historical Site in Jackson Ward.

“That gets woven into her DNA,” Anderson said. “That becomes a part of who she was and of course, now, from the point-of-view of 2024 … it’s tempting to think with an origin story like that, she must have been predestined to become an important historical figure.”

Walker graduated from high school in 1883 — a time when the national graduation rate was somewhere around 3.5% — and found work as a schoolteacher until her marriage in 1886.

“To get a high school degree at that time, it really was a unique achievement,” Anderson said. “It kind of automatically made you an elite member of society.”

After her marriage to Armstead Walker, a brick contractor, Maggie Walker began to devote time and energy to the Independent Order of St. Luke, a Black fraternal order. Fraternal orders like the Independent Order of St. Luke served as a type of “insurance” for the Black community at a time when segregation and refusal of services based on race was legal.

“At the time, this was kind of revolutionary,” Anderson said. “Because this happening at a time when yes, the war is over, slavery is over, but the white powers that be, they’re not interested in sharing access to services to Black folks.”

The Reconstruction Era

Gary Flowers, local historian and tour guide, says this history has been “deliberately hidden” from history books.

Flowers said Black fraternal orders exploded from the Richmond area during Reconstruction, a time where Black communities thrived between the end of the Civil War and the Jim Crow era.

“The white power structure abandoned African Americans in terms of services provided to Black people,” Flowers said. “So Black people turned to each other and not against each other, and formed mutual aid societies that evolved into insurance.”

Richmond’s history reflects this — both the first Black-owned insurance company and the first Black-owned bank were established in Richmond.

Walker became the president of the order in 1899 at a time when her predecessor left it a “sinking ship.” To promote the organization, Walker traveled around the country and worked to expand it from the world of insurance to new ventures.

“She takes over in 1899 and really radically transforms it,” Anderson said. 

Flowers, whose family has lived in Jackson Ward for four generations, runs historical walking tours of the neighborhood.

“Maggie Walker is the most unheralded woman, Black or white, in all of American history,” Flowers said. “She took the Order of St. Luke from 50 members when she took over in 1899 to over 100,000 members spanning twenty states.”

The order captured nationwide attention, including from other Black trailblazers of the time like Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. DuBois. It operated out of a four story building that “might as well have been a skyscraper,” for its time, Flowers said.

“It was a source of admiration and awe by then-national leaders of the Black community,” he said.

Jackson Ward was created in 1871 as one of the first efforts of redlining and gerrymandering in the reconstruction era. It was created as Richmond’s only Black political district, Flowers said, and was reportedly named after Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. Others claim it takes its name from U.S. President Andrew Jackson.

For a time, before Jim Crow laws were enacted, Black men were able to serve in city government. One such man who served Jackson Ward was Giles Jackson, the first Black lawyer to argue before the Virginia Supreme Court.  

Early examples of voter suppression were seen in Jackson Ward, according to Flowers. Often when Black men tried to cast their votes, armed white men stood guard.

“If I were trying to cast my ballot back then, and I see white men with pistols, shotguns, Confederate flags, either by silence or by voice I am now intimidated to cast my vote,” he said. “That started in Richmond.”

But even in the heart of the Jim Crow period, Jackson Ward thrived.

In 1890, it was known as “Black Wall Street,” decades before Tulsa, Oklahoma, was given the same recognition. Tulsa was later the site of a 1921 race massacre.

Virginia “led the nation” in Black-owned banks, Flowers said, and women contributed to the economic boom too.

“Black women created micro-entrepreneurial ventures," he said.

They provided laundry services, mending and even sold meals from windows. In its heyday, Jackson Ward was home to over 800 Black-owned businesses.

Walker chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in 1903, making her the first Black woman in U.S. history to do so.

The bank operated independently until 1930 when it consolidated with two other Black banks, Second Street Savings Bank and the Commercial Bank and Trust to create the Consolidated Bank and Trust.

The reason for the consolidation, Flowers said, was that other Black banks in Richmond were being shut down on the grounds of “unfounded” allegations of fraud, embezzlement and mismanagement. Walker approached the other banks with idea that if they stood together, racist policymakers couldn’t close them down.

The bank stayed open until 2021 when it was acquired by the Peoples’ Bank.

In 1902, she began a publication, The St. Luke Herald, which covered subjects relating to the order and advocated for the uplifting of Black people in Richmond and in the nation.

Anderson said Walker was involved in activism “from her teenage years to her final year.”

Perhaps the most apparent example of her activism can be seen in the 1904-1906 streetcar boycotts, of which Walker was an organizer.

After the Virginia General Assembly passed the “Act Concerning Public Transportation,” which made it legal for Richmond trollies to be segregated, The Virginia Passenger and Power Company announced it would begin enforcing segregated streetcars in Richmond.

In response, Walker used The St. Luke Herald to advocate for a city-wide trolley boycott, along with other members of the Black press like John Mitchell Jr., editor of The Richmond Planet.

“She uses her newspaper, The St. Luke Herald to publish several really stirring editorials,” Anderson said. “To kind of keep it going.”

Most copies of The St. Luke Herald have been lost to time, though the Maggie L. Walker historic site has some clippings in its collection. What is known is that the trolley boycott was successful and lasted nearly two years.

The Virginia Passenger and Power Company went out of business in 1906, nearly forty years before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.

As a lifelong history buff, graduate of the University of Virginia and former adjunct lecturer at Harvard, Flowers said the lack of Jackson Ward’s history taught in Richmond and the greater American school systems baffled him.

“It was deliberately hidden from us here in Virginia,” Flowers said. “We should have learned about the Walker-Mitchell boycott before we learned about the 1955 Montgomery boycott.”

In addition to their collaboration in activist pursuits, Walker and Mitchell combined forces to found the Lily Black Political Party in 1920. In 1921, they ran for government office as state secretary of education and governor, respectively.

“The idea that in the capital of the Confederacy they could found an all-Black political party is nationally significant,” Flowers said.

Walker was a suffragist as well, and even registered women to vote in the 1924 presidential election, just four years after the passage of the 19th Amendment. Walker, educator Rosa Bowser and Mamie Storrs, then-first lady of Ebenezer Baptist Church, organized women to vote at Old City Hall.

When Walker opened her own department store on Broad Street in 1905, she received pushback from white business owners. They began to boycott Walker’s supplier in hopes they would cease to do business with her. In 1911, they were successful, and the store closed.

Anderson said Walker faced opposition on two fronts: both for her race and her gender.

“In a speech she delivers in March of 1906, specifically to male members of the Independent Order of St. Luke,” he said. “If you read between the lines, she feels the need to make that speech because she must have been experiencing some sexist pushback from within the Independent Order of Saint Luke.”

Maggie Lena Walker died at the age of 70 in her home on December 15, 1934.

Her home, located on North 2nd Street, is now the National Maggie L. Walker Historic Site. Since 1975, it's served as a museum and landmark.

Walker’s legacy, Anderson said, is not only a testament to the resilience of the Black community, but to the human spirit as well.

“The greatest gift she leaves us with is the memory of how she responds to it,” Anderson said. “We see all of these obstacles, over and over and over again, in so many different forms constantly appearing before her, but what we never see, in any form, is her giving into them.”