Maggie L. Walker

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Maggie Lena Draper Walker was the first African American woman to charter and become president of a U.S. bank.

Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site/U.S. National Parks Service

Maggie L. Walkerwas an American businesswoman who played a major role in the organizational and commercial life of the Black community in Richmond, Virginia, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was the first Black woman to charter and become president of a bank.

Maggie Lena Draper’s mother, Elizabeth, was a formerly enslaved woman working in the Richmond household of abolitionist and Union agent Elizabeth Van Lew when she met Draper’s father, a white journalist and Confederate soldier. Elizabeth Draper married William Mitchell, who also worked in the Van Lew household, a few years after her daughter’s birth.

Maggie Draper graduated from the Armstrong Normal School in 1883 and then taught at the Lancaster School until her marriage in 1886 to Armstead Walker, Jr. They had three sons and a daughter. Maggie L. Walker devoted much of her time to the Grand United Order of St. Luke, an African American fraternal and cooperative insurance society in Richmond. Working her way up through various local and general offices, Walker became executive secretary-treasurer of the renamed Independent Order of St. Luke in 1899. At the time she took office, the order had some 3,400 members in 57 local chapters and was in debt.

Walker tackled her work with energy and business acumen. In 1902 she founded the St. Luke Herald to carry news of the order to local chapters and to help in its educational work. The Herald’s educational efforts included information regarding the training of children in habits of thrift, industry, and hygiene. In 1903 she opened the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, of which she was president, making her the first Black woman to establish a bank and to be its president. By 1924 the main office staff of the order had grown to 50 people who served a membership of more than 50,000 in 1,500 local chapters.

From 1929 to 1930 the Penny Savings Bank absorbed all other banks in Richmond owned by African Americans and became the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company. Walker served thereafter as the bank’s chairman of the board. She also helped found the Richmond Council of Colored Women in 1912. Serving as president, she helped raise large sums for the support of such institutions as Janie Porter Barrett’s Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls.

Walker’s house in Richmond was designated a national historic landmark in 1975. It became the Maggie L. Walker National Historical Site, operated by the National Park Service, in 1978. She is also commemorated with a statue, dedicated in 2017, at Maggie L. Walker Memorial Plaza in Richmond.

Walker’s gravestone in Richmond’s Evergreen Cemetery identifies her year of birth as 1867, the year that Walker herself claimed. In the absence of a birth certificate, research carried out after her death drew on census data and other material that suggested she may have been born in 1864 or 1865. Public historian Elvatrice Belsches discovered proof in Freedmen’s Bureau records that Walker had been born in 1864; after her finding was publicized in Richmond in 2009, it became widely accepted.