Financial History Issue 130 (Summer 2019) | Page 16
Black-owned banks began to crop up
in the early 20th century. Most eventu-
ally merged or failed, as did most White-
owned banks formed in that era, but
during their existence they helped Black
families to finance their businesses, educa-
tions, homes and consumer durable pur-
chases. According to Andrew F. Brimmer,
a distinguished African American econo-
mist and member of the Federal Reserve’s
Board of Governors from 1966 until 1974,
Black-owned banks faced higher costs
than other banks. Higher costs reduced
their profitability and increased their fra-
gility, but also partially explained why
incumbents had often charged Black bor-
rowers higher rates.
In the 1960s, several brokerages and an
investment bank owned by African Amer-
icans appeared on Wall Street. Before
that, only a few African Americans had
appeared in the nation’s financial capital
and they bore racialized nicknames like
the Dark Prince (Jeremiah Hamilton) and
the Black Wolf (H.R. George). In 1970, a
young financial journalist named Myron
Kandel (Board member of the Museum of
American Finance) helped Daniels & Bell
to raise sufficient capital to join the New
York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Most Black
investment banks and brokerages, like
H.L. Wright & Company, failed or were
acquired by White-owned firms, but not
before providing valuable services to cli-
ents and stirring incumbents to hire more
African American brokers and establish
branches in places like Harlem.
About the same time, female brokers
began to appear and a few, like Muriel
Siebert, even bought seats on the NYSE.
Urged on by legendary corporate gadfly
Wilma Soss, female investors long out-
numbered their male counterparts, though
they owned fewer shares than men did,
on average. Nevertheless, in the second
half of the 20th century women proved a
potent economic force, and incumbents
increasingly catered to them.
Women had been bank borrowers and
stockholders since the late 18th century,
Mary Roebling, pictured here in 1980,
was the first woman to serve as president
of a major US bank and one of the few
women to achieve a top management
position in banking in the 20th century.
but not until the late 19th century did a
few begin to take leadership positions in a
handful of small institutions. In the early
20th century, many led special women’s
departments established by large com-
mercial banks finally eager to attract their
deposits away from building and loans,
mutual savings banks and credit unions.
Some of those women were able to lever-
age that experience into general supervi-
sory roles and eventually a few, like Mary
Vail Andress and Mary Roebling, made it
into top management. The situation was
similar in insurance. Top female financial
executives, like Deanna Mulligan, the CEO
of Guardian Life Insurance Company of
America since 2011, remain too few.
While the Women’s Bank soon faltered,
female-led brokerages and investment
funds have thrived. Wall Street’s super
masculine culture, which at its nadir led to
misogynist practices like those of the infa-
mous “Boom Boom” room, created strong
incentives for female financiers to strike
off on their own. Important examples
include Garzarelli Capital, the eponymous
vehicle of NYU Ph.D. and 1987 stock mar-
ket crash predictor Elaine Garzarelli, and
14 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Summer 2019 | www.MoAF.org
Amy Domini’s widely emulated Social
Equity Fund. Today, Sallie Krawcheck’s
Ellevest invests with women’s longer lives
and lower incomes in mind.
Historians continue to unearth fasci-
nating examples of financial self-help pio-
neers, especially individuals like Minnie
Geddings Cox, who lived at the intersec-
tion of race, class and gender. Born to
former slaves in Mississippi in 1869, Cox
graduated from Nashville’s Fisk Univer-
sity before opening the Delta Penny Sav-
ings Bank and the Mississippi Beneficial
Life Insurance Company early in the 20th
century.
American Indian and poor White finan-
ciers, however, remain conspicuously
absent from these new narratives, but
for different reasons. Only recently have
scholars begun to explore in earnest the
history of poor Americans of Euroameri-
can descent who lurk in historical sources,
uncounted but in plain view, under scores
of derogatory nicknames. Physically, poor
Whites can easily “pass” as members of
the middle or upper classes, but their
language, behaviors and clothes often give
them away.
For readers who doubt that poor
Whites faced significant discrimination,
consider the following, which was uttered
in Indianapolis in 1956 about poor White
emigrants from southern Appalachia:
These people are creating terrible
problems in our cities. They can’t or
won’t hold a job, they flout the law
constantly and neglect their children,
they drink too much and their moral
standards would shame an alley cat.
To this day, poor Whites are often
shunted into their own “ghettos,” com-
posed of substandard houses, euphemisti-
cally called “mobile homes” and arranged
in tightly-packed “trailer parks,” ineligible
for standard mortgages and subject to the
whims of predatory landlords.
But the discrimination they face pales in
comparison to that inflicted upon Ameri-
can Indians. Enslaved, murdered, forced