Dwight Carter

By Paulina Bren

In the early 1980s , Wall Street was not yet the sought-after destination it would soon become , but Marianne Spraggins sensed she needed to be there . The daughter of a prominent lawyer and activist in New York , Marianne had grown up in a historic Harlem brownstone once owned by the wealthy , well-connected racketeer Madame St . Clair . She had been adventurous in her 20s , marrying a jazz musician and moving to Los Angeles , working as an airline stewardess ( as flight attendants were then called ) and on the NBC television shows Speaking Freely and Positively Black . After her adored father died in 1971 , she decided to honor him by becoming a third-generation Spraggins lawyer .

Marianne had a law degree from New York Law School , an additional LLM degree in international law from Harvard

Marianne Spraggins poses for a photo shoot for a profile in Black Enterprise , 1992 .

Law and was an associate professor at New York Law School — she did not need Wall Street . Yet she could not forget a seminar she ’ d taken on international business transactions , taught by Nicholas Deak , “ a very suave … mysterious ” Transylvaniaborn American Hungarian who would arrive for class in a different vintage car each time , his chauffeur behind the wheel . When she learned that Deak owned a Swiss bank , as well as the New York financial group Deak-Perera , she practically swooned .

Marianne immediately understood that Deak represented a level of power she had not yet experienced . Growing up , she had “ understood political power from this Harlem vantage point of getting people in jobs and knowing city hall and getting people in judgeships . But I always knew there was something more . And when I took that course , and we went down into those bowels of Wall Street , I didn ’ t know what they did , but there was a different energy , and just a , kind of like a veil being lifted for me . I didn ’ t know what it was , but I knew it was really important and it was kind of a magnet .”

The money was certainly an allure for Marianne , “ but that wasn ’ t the driving force .” Instead , it was the dawning recognition that Wall Street represented power and “ knowing that this is a table that we did not sit at . And that we had to .” And so she set her sights on Wall Street , to be one of the first Black women to sit at the table with a full place setting in front of her .

But it was one thing to decide to go to Wall Street and quite another to figure out how to get there , or even understand what Wall Street was . Looking for a way in , Marianne was introduced to Russell L . Goings Jr ., the founder of one of the first Black brokerage firms , First Harlem Securities Corporation . Goings had started out as a shoeshine boy at a brokerage house . A former professional football player with an intellectual bent , he warned her that Wall Street was rough , “ brutal for Black people .”

But Goings did not put Marianne off . “ I called up every single Black person on the Street at firms and said , ‘ Hi , I ’ m Marianne Spraggins , let ’ s get together .’” Few of them were willing to meet with her , and she should have understood right then that the game of survival on Wall

16 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Winter 2025 | www . MoAF . org