3.9 Black Organizations and Institutions

Because segregation and discrimination excluded them from many white-owned businesses, African Americans built their own businesses and organizations to serve Black customers and make their communities more self-sufficient: insurance companies, banks, barbershops, beauty parlors, funeral homes and newspapers.

Black-owned banks gave Black families a safe place to save and borrow when white banks wouldn't serve them. Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company in Nashville, founded in 1904 as the One Cent Savings Bank, is the oldest continuously operating Black-owned bank in the US. The required clock was used by the bank from 1920 to 2013. In 1903 Maggie Lena Walker in Richmond became the first Black woman to charter a bank.

Madam C.J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove to formerly enslaved parents, built a company selling hair-care and beauty products made for Black women. She trained thousands of Black women as sales agents, giving them a way to earn their own income. The required 1924 photo shows a convention of her agents at Villa Lewaro, her mansion in New York.

Walker is often called the first self-made woman millionaire in the US. Her advertisements celebrated Black beauty, and she gave generously to Black schools, the YMCA and the NAACP's campaign against lynching.

Black newspapers and magazines grew rapidly. Papers like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier, and The Crisis, the NAACP's magazine edited by Du Bois, delivered local and national news to Black readers, recorded community life, from weddings to church events, and protested discrimination and lynching. The Black press also encouraged migration north (3.16).

African Americans had long transformed Christian worship, and they built their own institutions. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1816, was the first Black Christian denomination in the US. After Reconstruction the number of Black churches grew quickly, and Black Baptists formed the National Baptist Convention in 1895.

Churches were much more than places of worship. They were safe spaces for organizing, community gatherings and cultural expression, and they trained leaders. Many activists, musicians and politicians got their start in the church, and churches would later be centers of the Civil Rights movement (4.6).