Financial History Issue 130 (Summer 2019) | Page 24
Independent Order of St. Luke staff, with Maggie Walker pictured near the center.
and a publishing house. The NFC planned
to open factories to manufacture clothing,
toiletries, canned goods and other items.
These factories would employ thousands
of Black workers to produce goods for
Black consumers in the United States
and to ship goods overseas on the Black
Star Line, the UNIA’s shipping company.
Garvey openly refused White investment
capital in the NFC, boasting, “The world
is looking to see what the New Negro
will achieve in the field of commerce.”
He believed large-scale investment and
finance by and among Blacks to be essen-
tial to the broader dream of racial uplift
and self-help.
Garvey’s message found support among
some women members of the Black entre-
preneurial elite. Both Maggie Lena Walker
and beauty culture products mogul Madam
C.J. Walker—reputed to be the first Black
woman millionaire—admired Garvey.
Garvey’s photograph and his famous edi-
torial, “African Fundamentalism,” hung
prominently in Maggie Lena Walker’s
parlor. Scholars consistently cite Booker
T. Washington as a critical influence on
Garvey, but Garvey also drew inspira-
tion from female contemporaries such as
Maggie Lena Walker. The IOSL’s social
activities and its business model; Walker’s
strong support of independent, black eco-
nomic self-help; and her focus on the
needs of working-class people represented
foundational models for Garvey and the
UNIA.
Both the AIFC and the NNFC hoped
to siphon some of the largess from Gar-
vey’s coffers into their own and relied
on appeals to manhood to buttress their
efforts. Despite past clandestine efforts
to secure assistance from White inves-
tors, both the NNFC and the AIFC advo-
cated—at least publicly—self-help efforts
that were independent of White assistance
as a cornerstone of manly enterprise. The
AIFC and the NNFC worked hard to win
small, individual investors to raise their
22 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Summer 2019 | www.MoAF.org
multimillion-dollar capital requirements.
Black business had long solicited and
depended on Black investment dol-
lars. Working- and middle-class Blacks
responded to rhetoric that stressed stock
purchase not merely for personal gain,
but for racial uplift and collective pros-
perity. In the 1920s, links between race
pride and manhood made full-throated
endorsements of stock investment as a
civic duty and a demonstration of citizen-
ship. For example, the AIFC promoted
investing as a “privilege and a right” and
as an experiment in “Financial Democ-
racy.” The NNFC’s prospectus also con-
nected a desire for wealth with the desires
of any true citizen, as stressed in a string
of superlatives that deserves extended
quotation:
Every progressive, thrifty, red blooded,
clear headed, liberty loving, property
seeking American with grit in his craw
and iron in his bones cherishes lofty