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By Justene Hill Edwards

On July 20, 1868, Black farmer Enon T. Wright made the almost nine-mile journey from Dog River, Alabama, to Mobile, Alabama. Born enslaved in 1821, in Greene County, Alabama, Wright was likely familiar with the region’ s waterways, as he spent the first 36 years of his life living and working within the alluvial landscape that characterized Alabama’ s Gulf Coast. He made the voyage by boat or on foot or maybe a combination of both. He surely traveled past cotton plantations and a factory or two as he made his way

Left: The former Freedman’ s Bank building on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, DC. Right: Photograph of the plaque at the site of the Freedman’ s Bank building in Washington, DC, taken in May 2022. into Mobile. The city was a major port and a hub of industrial and economic enterprise during the period of slavery. His relationship to enslavement, however, differed from the over 430,000 enslaved people who lived in Alabama in 1860, before the outbreak of the Civil War.

Enon Wright was extraordinary by many standards. And maybe the decisions that brought him to this moment, the exceptionality of his life as a formerly enslaved Black man, permeated his thoughts. Using a mixture of skill, ingenuity and a dash of luck, Wright did what most other enslaved people could not have done: he purchased his own freedom. For $ 900($ 31,100 today), he negotiated with his enslaver to buy his way out of slavery in 1857. With his freedom papers in hand, he worked to earn and save as much money as he could, through the danger of being a free man in a slave state, and through the Civil War, where the potential for universal freedom hung in the balance. After the war, he labored as a farmer in Dog River, surviving the unpredictability of Reconstruction, setting aside money as he went along.

Then, on that day in July 1868, the 47-year-old Wright traveled from his home in Dog River to Mobile. His intended destination was 41 Saint Michael Street, mere blocks away from the Mobile River, which separated Alabama and the Florida panhandle. By entering the building on Saint Michael Street, Wright decided to take a chance on— and to put his trust in— a financial institution that he hoped would support his life as a freed person. He strolled into the Mobile branch of the Freedman’ s Bank, established in January 1866, to open an account.

Wright spoke with the branch’ s cashier, a 29-year-old white New Yorker named

14 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Spring 2025 | www. MoAF. org