Maggie Lena Walker

Maggie Lena Draper was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1864, the year before the Civil War ended. Her mother was a former slave who worked as a laundress; her stepfather was found drowned in the river when Maggie was a girl, and she helped by delivering washing to white customers. She trained as a teacher, but under the rules of the time had to give up teaching when she married Armstead Walker in 1886.

At fourteen she had joined the Independent Order of St Luke, a mutual society that helped Black families pay for illness and burial. She rose through it, and in 1899 was made its head at a moment when it had a few hundred dollars in the bank and was close to folding. She rebuilt it into an organisation of tens of thousands of members across more than twenty states.

In 1902 she started a newspaper, the St Luke Herald, and in 1903 opened the St Luke Penny Savings Bank, becoming the first African American woman to charter a bank in the United States. The bank lent to Black homebuyers when white banks would not, and in 1905 she added a department store where Black women could try on clothes, which shops downtown refused to allow.

Her later life brought grief and illness. In 1915 her son shot and killed her husband, mistaking him for a burglar; diabetes and an injured leg later confined her to a wheelchair. She kept working. When the Depression hit, she merged her bank with two others; the result survived for decades. She died in 1934, and her house is now a national historic site.