Banking

For Black women, banking was never only about money.

Between 1888 and 1930, African Americans opened more than a hundred banks and thousands of other financial institutions. In Banking on Freedom, Shennette Garrett-Scott recovers this remarkable era of Black financial innovation through the story of the St. Luke Bank — the first and only bank organized, financed, and run by Black women.

The teller cage and boardroom became sites of activism as Black women used banking, finance, and insurance to claim economic, social, and political power. Success, however, brought new challenges. Black economic autonomy drew violent backlash as well as aggressive scrutiny from state officials who regarded it as a threat to both the racial order and prevailing ideas about democratic capitalism. Banking on Freedom traces how Black women navigated these pressures while confronting sexism, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.

The first book to center Black women’s engagement with the elite worlds of finance, Banking on Freedom reveals how race, gender, and class shaped the meanings of wealth, risk, citizenship, and freedom in American capitalism.

Banking on Freedom
Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal
Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism
Columbia University Press, 2019

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A beautifully written, comprehensive, and highly original study of Black women’s savvy business acumen in the aftermath of slavery through the early twentieth century. Garrett-Scott should be commended for boldly modeling just how gender and race shape capitalism and finance in ways few scholars have addressed.

Daina Ramey Berry, author of The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to the Grave, in the Building of a Nation

This recovery of one aspect of Black women's history will appeal to scholars as well as those with a serious interest in the history of finance
and women’s history.

Publishers Weekly

Garrett-Scott’s accounting is a work of economic history, but it reads less as a description of 20th century Black capitalism, and more as a rendering of what is possible when women and people of color can effectively channel their own money for personal and collective economic development.

Scalawag Magazine

Banking on Freedom is a major contribution to the history of US capitalism. It will undoubtedly inspire new scholarship. It pushes readers to reframe black women’s ﬁght for economic justice in the most expansive ways.

Keona K. Ervin, author of Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis

Garrett-Scott strikes a careful balance with a narrative that brings together a cross-section of fields, including social, economic, political, labor, and business history with significant depth for a fresh perspective. Banking on Freedom will stand as a groundbreaking piece of scholarship that offers a useable
framework — a model — for historians interested in Black banking history.

Brandon K. Winford, author of John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights

This exploration of gender and race in the making of modern US finance represents an important historiographical intervention. Banking on Freedom is also an engaging and accessible read that is ripe for the current political and economic moment.

Journal of American Ethnic History

Finalist
Hagley Award

2019 Best Book in
Business History

Brown Award

2019 Best Book in
Black Women's History

Hine Award

2019 Best Book in Black Women's and Gender History

Wall Award

2020 Best Book in
Southern Economic History

Garrett-Scott’s extensively researched and documented study is the first history of U.S. finance that puts African American women at the center. Banking on Freedom makes a tremendously monumental contribution to African American banking history, and it substantially enriches our understanding of U.S. finance and capitalism.

Juliet E. K. Walker, author of The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship

Shennette Garrett-Scott’s compelling and highly original account demonstrates that, for black people, banks were more than financial institutions. In the hands of black women, capital accumulation, credit, and insurance became community building practices, mutual aid, strategies for collective survival, and sources of contestation. Banking on Freedom offers a new perspective on the entire community and the nation.

Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics,
and the Black Working Class

Moving fluidly from the change purse to the bank vault, Banking on Freedom offers the first full accounting of the financial sector, woman-hood, and Afro-America simultaneously transformed. Rich and brilliant.

N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida

Recovering the important and active role black women have played in the development of modern American capitalism, Shennette Garrett-Scott’s Banking on Freedom is a paradigm-shifting work that stands to make a monumental contribution to the field and is certain to inspire future generations of scholars.

Tiffany Gill, author of Beauty Shop Politics: African American
Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry

Garrett-Scott reclaims the stories of black women who — as bank founders and clerks, investors, aspiring home owners, loan seekers, and, yes, as those denied loans — asserted their own economic ethos. A compelling account of black women’s ideas about money, savings, lending, obligation, and economic well-being.

Elsa Barkley Brown, author of Black Women in America:
An Historical Encyclopedia