Maggie Lena Walker

Maggie Lena Walker was the first Black woman in the U.S. to charter a bank – she was also the first Black woman in the U.S. to serve as a bank’s president. But the bank was only one of her many endeavors which focused on improving the lives of the entire Black community.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. I've had
Maggie Lena Walker on my episode shortlist for really a
long time now, so when her name came up just

(00:24):
in passing in our recent episode on Olivia Ward Bush Banks,
it seemed like a good time to move her up
to the top of that list. As we said in
that earlier episode, Maggie Lena Walker was the first black
woman in the United States to charter a bank. She
was also the first black woman in the US to
serve as a bank's president. But the bank was just

(00:46):
one of her many, many endeavors. A lot of her
life's work was described in the language of the time
as race work. This is work that was undertaken by
black people for other black people to try to dismantled
the effects of racism and oppression and to collectively improve
the lives of the whole black community. Some elements of

(01:07):
this would go on to be professionalized in the field
of social work, which is also something that came up
a little bit in that episode on Olivia Ward Bush Banks.
As a note up front, in this episode, we are
going to be talking about a number of tragedies that
Walker experienced in her life, and that includes an accidental

(01:29):
shooting death that took place within her immediate family. And
the early part of this episode also includes a discussion
of sexual consent, and that's in the context of Walker's
mother and biological father. Maggie Lena Walker was born Maggie
Lena Draper on June fifteenth, but there are contradictory reports

(01:49):
about what year in her adult life she often gave.
Her birth year is eighteen sixty seven, a couple of
years after the end of the U. S Civil War,
but various diary entries, family papers, and census records suggests
that she may have been born as early as eighteen
sixty four, before the end of the Civil War, when
her birthplace of Richmond, Virginia, was the capital of the Confederacy.

(02:12):
Maggie's mother, Elizabeth Draper, was probably enslaved from birth, but
by the time Maggie was born, she was a free,
paid cook's assistant in the home of unionist and abolitionist
Elizabeth van lew. Elizabeth Draper gave birth to Maggie on
the Van Low estate. If that happened in eighteen sixty four,

(02:33):
when the Civil War was still going on, then Van
Lou was at the time running a massive and successful
spy network for the Union. That's something that was covered
in our most recent Saturday Classic on one of that network, spies,
Mary Elizabeth Bowser. Maggie's biological father was Eccles Cuthbert, who
was born in Ireland and in the words of an obituary,

(02:55):
he immigrated to the US quote while a mere lad.
He ended up in South care Lina, where he joined
the militia before the start of the Civil War. Eccles
became injured or ill while stationed in Richmond and was
reassigned from the infantry to working as a clerk at
a convalescent hospital there. It is possible that he visited
or even boarded at the Van Lou estate. So Maggie

(03:19):
being the daughter of a free black woman and a
Confederate soldier isn't the kind of detail that we can
just drop into the episode without some more context, because
it brings up immediate and obvious questions about whether this
was or even could have been consensual. And then this
is compounded by the fact that we don't know Elizabeth's
birth year for sure. If Maggie was born in eighteen

(03:41):
sixty four, then Eccles would have been twenty two at
the time, but historians put Elizabeth's age at that point
as anywhere between fourteen and nineteen. One end of that
spectrum obviously horrifying, and the other like a twenty two
year old and a nineteen year old still would beats
pretty typical in a lot of contexts today. Another complication

(04:05):
here is that many modern descriptions of this repeat unsubstantiated details.
Some describe Ecol's Cuthbert as an abolitionist, sometimes specifying but
he became an abolitionist after meeting Elizabeth van lou But
accounts that make this claim don't cite any sources for it,
And there are also write ups on Maggie Lena Walker's

(04:26):
life that note that Elizabeth Draper and Eccles would have
been legally prohibited from marrying, but there's no documentation that
suggests that they ever wanted to. Yes, some of this
really comes across to me almost as an effort to
like romanticize or sanitize something that we just don't have
the details on. We also don't have a clear sense
of what Maggie's or her mother's feelings were about this

(04:49):
during their lifetimes. After the war, Eccles became a widely
known newspaper correspondent, and in her adult life, Maggie wrote
an account where she described him as quote a writer
who was writing and making history. Directly after the close
of the war. When Maggie gave birth to her first son,
she named him Russell Eccles Talmudge Walker, which doesn't really

(05:12):
suggest that Eccles Cuthbert was a painful memory for the family.
There's also some suggestion that Eccles left Maggie some money
when he died in nineteen o two, and that Maggie
used that money to help fund her endeavors. And then
in the late nineteen twenties, Maggie seems to have provided
some biographical detail to the publication Who's Who in Colored

(05:33):
America that actually named Eccles Cuthbert as her father. At
the same time, Eccles does not seem to have had
much involvement in Elizabeth Draper's or Maggie's lives beyond that
he reportedly offered to pay for Maggie to be educated
in Baltimore, but if he made that offer, there is
no evidence that it was accepted. There is also an

(05:54):
account in a diary that Maggie kept as an adult,
which is repeated in family lore, that ecl sent her
a dress when she graduated from high school, and that
her mother threw that dress into the stove. Yes, so
there's a lot here that is vague and contradictory and
could be interpreted in a number of ways. Regardless though,

(06:16):
of how Elizabeth Draper and her daughter Maggie each viewed this,
their lives would have been very difficult during Maggie's earliest year,
since her mother was a young single mom working as
a domestic but then, on May eighteen sixty eight, Elizabeth
Draper married William Mitchell, that was Elizabeth Van Lew's butler.

(06:36):
They got married at First African Baptist Church in Richmond.
After this, William raised Maggie as his own daughter. In
eighteen seventy, William and Elizabeth had a son named Johnny.
William eventually got a job as a waiter or possibly
as head waiter, at the St. Charles Hotel, which at
the time was the most prominent hotel in Richmond. He

(06:59):
was making enough money that the family was able to
move off of the Van Loo property and to a
small home of their own on what was known as
College Alley, which was close to the hotel and to
their church. But this period of relative prosperity for the
family did not last for very long. In February of
eight seventy six, William's body was found in the James

(07:19):
River after he had been missing for about five days.
His death was ruled a suicide, but Elizabeth Draper Mitchell
was convinced that he had been murdered, possibly in the
course of a robbery. So once again Elizabeth was a
single parent, and there was really only one job available
to her as a black woman that would have allowed
her to stay home with her children, and that was

(07:41):
to take in laundry. In the South, until the development
of washing machines and the establishment of commercial laundry businesses,
this work was overwhelmingly done by black women who were
working from their homes. Doing laundry by hand was incredibly demanding,
It was time consuming, and it could also be dangerous
since it involved working with things like boiling water, lie soap,

(08:05):
and irons that would have been heated in a fire.
The combination of difficult, dangerous work, long hours, and low
wages was part of laundry work all over the South,
and this is what led to laundry workers in Atlanta
forming a union and going on strike in eighteen eighty one.
So the Atlanta Washerwoman's Strike took place eleven years after

(08:27):
Maggie's stepfather died. When that happened, Maggie would have been
somewhere between nine and twelve years old. She was attending
the public schools for black children that had been recently
established in Richmond, and she started helping her mother with
this home laundry business in addition to going to school.
Later on, she would say quote, I was not born

(08:48):
with a silver spoon in my mouth, but with a
laundry basket practically on my head. Maggie attended three public
schools between about eighteen seventy two and eighteen eighty three.
The first, known as Old Lancastrian School, had originally been
a school run by Quakers for white children, but it
had been renovated and reopened as a school for black
children in eighteen seventy one. From there, she went to

(09:11):
Navy Hill School, which was the only school in Richmond
that had a black faculty, although the school still had
a white principle. She finished her education at Richmond Colored
Normal School. It was while she was attending the Normal
School that Maggie joined an organization that would play an
enormous role in the rest of her life, and she
would play an enormous role in it. That was the

(09:34):
Independent Order of St. Luke. We'll talk more about that
after a sponsor break. The Independent Order of St. Luke
started out in Baltimore in eighteen sixty seven as a
secret society that was founded by Mary Prout. It followed

(09:57):
in the footsteps of Mutual Aid Society I das that
had been established before the Civil War. These had to
be secret because of laws that banned black people from congregating.
This grew into a fraternal organization that provided support and
care when its members were sick and at the end
of their lives, including paying for people's burials. So it

(10:19):
was part service organization, part insurance plan. People paid a
fee to join. They paid regular dues, and then benefits
were paid out if they became sick or disabled or
upon their death. After some internal divisions, the Richmond organization
split off in eighteen seventy seven under the leadership of
William Forrester. When Maggie Lena Mitchell became a member in

(10:41):
eighteen eighty one, it was as part of the Good
Idea Council Number sixteen of the Independent Order of the
Sons and Daughters of St. Luke's. At that point, she
was a student at the Richmond Colored Normal School. She
was initially supposed to graduate from that school in eighteen
eighty two, but the school board added a requirement for
students to study Latin, French or German, so Maggie's entire

(11:04):
graduating class was delayed by a year because none of
them had had that instruction. Along with other socioeconomic factors,
that meant that no one graduated from the school in
eighteen eighty two, and then only ten students did in
eighteen eighty three. Plans for the eighteen eighty three commencement
ceremony may have been one of Maggie's first experiences with

(11:25):
organized protests. It seems likely that she was involved, but
it's not concretely documented. Graduation for Richmond's white public school
students was held at the Richmond Theater, but ceremonies for
black students were held at one of the city's black churches.
Students from the Normal Schools eighteen eighty three graduating class
wanted to have the same graduation ceremony that the white

(11:47):
students got. Students convinced the city's black churches to tell
the school board that their facilities were not available for
commencement that year. Maggie's classmate, Wendell P. Dabney, who would
go on to at a biography of her in, wrote
a letter stating that the black children's parents paid the
same taxes as the white children's parents did, so they

(12:09):
should have access to the same taxpayer funded graduation at
the Richmond Theater. The Richmond Theater agreed to allow black
students at the graduation ceremony, but only if the seating
was segregated with the black students in the balcony. This,
of course, was not acceptable to the students. In the end,
commencement was held at the assembly hall at the Normal School,

(12:32):
which just wasn't big enough for the event, so the
school had to limit how many friends and family members
students could bring. This is one of the earliest protests
against segregation in public schools in the United States. After graduating,
Maggie Lena Mitchell taught public school for three years. This
included the only year during this era that there were

(12:53):
any Black principles in Richmond's public schools. They were hired
in the wake of reforms that had been in instituted
by the Readjuster Party, which was formed and took control
of the Virginia Legislature during this period, and then the
black principles that had been hired were fired a year
later after the Democratic Party went a majority. Instead, married

(13:15):
women were not permitted to teach, so Maggie left her
job after marrying Armstead Walker Jr. On September fourteenth, eighty six.
Armstead worked in his family's brick masonry and construction business,
and they had met at a Sunday school program at
First African Baptist Church. They went on to have three children,
Russell Eccles tow Mudge Walker on December nine, eight nine,

(13:39):
Armstead Mitchell Walker on July eighte and Melvin DeWitt Walker
on August tenth, eight Sadly, the younger Armstead Walker died
when he was just about seven months old, and Maggie's
half brother, Johnny died just a few months after that.
On April twenty three, eight four, Maggie seems to have

(13:59):
throw herself into her work after these losses. Really throughout
her life, both her faith and her works tended to
be huge sources of comfort to her after things like
this happened. She had been rising through the leadership of
the Independent Order of St Luke, and around this time
she started working to establish a juvenile department, which would

(14:19):
emphasize values like thrift and responsibility and young people, and
also provide life insurance for children. It was also during
these years that one of Armstead's relatives, Polly Anderson, also
came to live with the Walkers. She's described in family
records as a foster or adopted daughter, and it's clear
that she was considered to be a member of the family,

(14:42):
but at some points she also earned a salary for
her work in the household. In eight nine, after thirteen
years with the organization, Walker was elected right worthy Grand
Secretary of the Independent Order of St Luke, which was
its highest role. In spite of Walker's work to make
changes and to start the juvenile Department, the organization was

(15:03):
really struggling. It had a little more than a thousand
adult members and only thirty one dollars in change in
the treasury, but it had at least four hundred dollars
in outstanding bills. William Forrester, who had led the Order
since breaking away from the organization in Baltimore, had refused
to continue leading it, maintaining that the organization was dying,

(15:26):
but Walker had plans to turn the Order around. In
her words, her quote first work was to draw around
me women. The first executive Board elections after she took
on the role were held in nineteen o one, and
six of the nine elected board members were women. Walker
was a charismatic, powerful, and incredibly effective speaker, and on

(15:49):
August twenty, nineteen o one, she gave a speech at
the Order's annual convention in which she announced a plan
specifically to improve the lives of black women. In a speech,
she said, quote, who is so circumscribed and himmed in
in the race of life, in the struggle for bread, meat,
and clothing as the Negro woman? They are even being

(16:11):
denied the work of teaching Negro children. Can't this great
order in which there are so many good women, willing women,
hard working women, noble women, whose money is here, whose
interest is here, whose hearts and souls are here do
something towards giving to those who have made it what
it is. She laid out a plan that would she

(16:34):
hoped to become self sustaining. The order would start a newspaper,
a bank, a department store, and factories which would make
clothing that could be sold in the store. Although the
plan to open factories did not come to fruition. The St.
Luke Harold began publishing in nineteen o two, with Walker
acting as managing editor. This was followed by the St.

(16:56):
Luke Penny Savings Bank in en three with Walker as president.
Then the St. Luke Imporium opened in nive. Each of
these ventures had multiple purposes. A big one for all
of them was to provide jobs. The jobs that were
available to black people in Richmond overwhelmingly involved manual labor,

(17:17):
a lot of it degrading or dangerous. But the newspaper
would employ black writers, editors, photographers, printers, The bank would
employ black cashiers, and the department store would employ black clerks,
stock workers, sales staff, and the like. At the same time,
the St. Luke Harold would keep subscribers informed of St.

(17:38):
Luke's business, along with local news, civil rights issues, and
what was happening at the bank and the emporium. It
would cover the suffrage movement as it related to black women,
as well as lynchings and crimes against black people that
the white press was not covering. It would be, in
Walker's words, quote, a trumpet to sound the orders, so
that the st Luke upon the mountaintop and the st

(18:00):
Luke dwelling by the side of the sea can hear
the same order, keep step to the same music, march
in unison to the same command, although miles and Miles intervene.
The Penny Savings Bank would, in Walker's words quote, take
the nickels and turn them into dollars. It would provide
services that black people were excluded from at the all

(18:21):
white banks, including loans and mortgages. That would also encourage
people to save their money, no matter how little money
they had to start with. The bank was funded by
the purchase of shares, with the Order of St. Luke
purchasing two hundred shares and account holders encouraged to buy
at least one share at a cost of ten dollars,
which could be paid for in ten monthly installments. The

(18:45):
bank also distributed physical banks for people to keep at home,
to encourage people, especially children, to save up their change
until they could make a deposit. Although this was not
the only black owned bank in Richmond, it was the
first to be run primarily by women. Although when the
bank first opened the only experienced Black cashier that Walker
could find was a man, over time it had account

(19:08):
holders all over the Southeast, thanks in part to Walkers
extensive travels to spread the word about the bank, and
the emporium provided a place for black people to shop
without the discrimination or harassment that they generally faced at
white owned stores, which forced black customers to use a
separate entrance, barred them from eating at lunch counters, and

(19:29):
refused to allow them to try on clothing and hats.
The emporium also prioritized black owned suppliers, keeping the money
that was spent there within the black community. As Walker
said in a speech in nineteen o six, quote by black,
every time you set foot in a white man's store,
you were making the lion of prejudice stronger and stronger.

(19:50):
As all of this was going on, which is a
lot for one person to home. In four Walker bought
a new home on East Lee Street in the Richmond
neighborhood known as Jackson Ward, which was nicknamed the Harlem
of the South. The Walkers moved in after about a
year of upgrades and renovations, including converting the gas lighting
to electric and adding indoor plumbing, complete with a bidat

(20:14):
in the upstairs bathroom. Over the years, the Walkers added
on to this home as the family grew larger, with
Russell and Melvin getting married and living in the house
with their wives and their children. Polly Anderson lived with
them as well, eventually marrying Maurice Payne and moving with
him to an apartment over the garage. Maggie's mother, Elizabeth,
who started working as a midwife during this same period,

(20:36):
lived in the home as well. As the years went on,
this home was increasingly busy and bustling, and it was
always exquisitely decorated. I will say that Maggie Lena Walker
herself was also always exquisitely dressed. Every single picture of
her she looks amazing. Yes, yes, she uh knew how

(20:59):
to wear a garment for sure, and to pick like
beautiful clothes. And she carried herself in all of these
pictures like she has a very distinctive posture in all
of them. Anyway, She obviously was a woman who cared
very much about her appearance and looking good and having
a household that looked and felt beautiful. Holding the top

(21:21):
post at the Independent Order of St. Luke and starting
a newspaper and chartering a bank and establishing a department
store is a lot, as Holly said earlier, but that
was not all she was doing. In nineteen o four,
Walker helped organize a boycott of the Virginia Passenger and
Power Company. In April of that year, Virginia had passed

(21:41):
a law allowing street car companies to decide whether to
segregate their cars, and the Virginia Passenger and Power Company
had announced that it would be segregating. Richmond's black community.
Boycotted the street cars for about two years, and the
company went out of business in nineteen o six. In
nineteen o seven, Walker became a founding member of the

(22:02):
Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs. In nineteen o eight,
she donated five hundred dollars to the National Training School
for Women and Girls in Washington, d c. Under the
condition that her friend, Nanny Helen Burrows, who was raising
money for the school, did not say where the money
came from. Although Burrows technically didn't, she did use the

(22:23):
money to build a dormitory that was named Maggie L.
Walker Hall. In nineteen ten, the St. Luke Penny Saver
Bank became a separate entity from the Independent Order of St. Luke.
This followed the passage of a new law that prohibited
secret orders from running banks, and it also followed an
embezzlement scandal at a different bank run by a different organization,

(22:45):
the Grand Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers
that was another fraternal society. This scandal combined with a
number of large loan defaults to put the True Reformers
Bank into receivership, and that Order never really everard. We
mentioned earlier that St. Luke paid out disability and death
benefits much like an insurance company, and in the nineteen

(23:07):
teens it started to face more and more insurance regulations.
Often people had joined St. Luke and similar organizations when
they were relatively young, and then the organizations had invested
or otherwise used the dues that they collected in various
enterprises which may or may not have been financially successful.
This led to questions and concerns about what would happen

(23:29):
is more and more members got older and died, especially
when the organization that was paying out death benefits also
ran the bank or many of its members deposited their money.
Walker and the rest of the leadership at the Independent
Order of St. Luke wanted their operations to be above
board and to comply with these newly introduced regulations in

(23:49):
both banking and insurance, and as far as the bank went,
these efforts were successful. In nineteen eleven, the bank successfully
made it through a thorough investigation. As the nineteen teams progressed,
the Order itself continually made adjustments to its insurance programs
to keep them in compliance with these evolving regulations. But

(24:10):
the St. Luke Emporium was not as successful. Throughout its existence,
it had faced retaliation from white business owners, including the
formation of an all White Retail Dealers Association, which was
established to drive black owned stores out of business. This
included spreading the word among wholesalers that the association would
boycott anyone who sold products through black owned stores. The

(24:34):
emporium also faced reluctance from black shoppers, who feared retaliation
if they didn't keep shopping at white owned stores, or
who couldn't afford to pay a higher price that often
came along with shopping at a smaller business. So in
nineteen eleven, the emporium closed. Wendell P. Dabney described it
as closing quote in defeat but not disgrace. Walker kept

(24:58):
taking on new leadership role, including becoming president of the
Richmond Council of Colored Women, which was founded in nineteen twelve.
But in nineteen fifteen, the Walker family experienced a horrific tragedy,
and we're going to talk about that after we first
take a sponsor break. We noted at the top of

(25:24):
the show that there was an accidental shooting in Maggie
Lena Walker's immediate family that happened on June nineteen fifteen,
after her son Russell mistook her husband Armstead his father
for a burglar. Walker called this an indescribable tragedy and
the most trying ordeal of her life. A crew had

(25:45):
been working on the roof of the Walker family home,
and on June nineteenth, they had left a ladder propped
against the back of the house. Some of the Walkers
had been worried that someone might use the ladder to
break into the house, especially since the warm weather met
the upstairs windows were open. That night, some of the
Walkers thought they heard an intruder on the roof and
called the police, but the police found nothing. The family

(26:07):
was still concerned on the so Armstead borrowed a gun
from a family friend and put it in his bedroom drawer.
That night, a child who lived across the street came
to the Walker house to say that his mother had
seen someone on their roof. Armstead and Russell both went
to investigate, with Russell getting the gun from his father's drawer.

(26:29):
When Russell saw a man on the porch, he fired
one shot, then returned to the living room and told
his mother, I got him. Maggie replied, got who, to
which Russell had answered the man he's on the back porch.
When Russell, Maggie, and Polly all went out to the porch,
they discovered Armstead's body. The whole family was, of course horrified, traumatized,

(26:52):
and completely grief stricken. Rumors started to spread almost immediately
that this shooting had not been an accident. It. Walker
was criticized for calling a doctor and an attorney immediately
after the shooting, but not calling the police, and then
by the time the police arrived at the Walker home
it was described as swarmed with thousands of people. A

(27:14):
coroner's inquest found that Armstead had been killed by a
pistol shot that his son, Russell, had fired, but the
coroner's jury said it could not determine quote whether the
shooting was done knowingly and maliciously, or was owing to
the son's mistaking his father for a robber, just in
case people are wondering. Russell was in his early twenties
at this point. A police court hearing followed and the

(27:38):
judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence. But during
the hearing, a prosecutor asked Maggie Lena Walker, quote, didn't
you say at the time of the shooting, Russell, I
told you not to do it. Walker answered no, she
did not. I'm not sure where exactly this question came from,
but it led people to speculate that mag and Russell

(28:00):
had conspired to kill Armstead for the insurance money. Even
though the justice at the police court hearing had dismissed
the case, rumors and suspicion about it continued, and ultimately
the case was brought before a grand jury which indicted
Russell for murder. Russell was held for about five months
before the trial started. The Independent Order of St Luke

(28:23):
held its annual convention during that time, and Maggie faced
calls to step down, with her critics arguing that the
organization should cut ties with anyone who was connected to
such a scandal. Then the Sunday before the trial began,
Maggie was walking to church with a friend when a
car nearly backed into them, and Maggie sprained her ankle
while trying to get out of the way. This added

(28:45):
to the ongoing issues from a previous injury that she
had sustained in nineteen o eight when she broke her
kneecap in a fall. At trial, witnesses for the prosecution
testified that they had heard or seen Russell having alter
kations with his father. The defense rested in part on
the idea that Maggie's position in the community meant that

(29:07):
she had powerful enemies, and that these allegations were rooted
in people feeling envious of and threatened by her. In
the end, Russell was acquitted, but he clearly carried a
lot of guilt and shame about all this for the
rest of his life. After her son had been acquitted,
Maggie Lena Walker successfully sued the Standard Accident Insurance Company

(29:31):
after it refused to pay Armstead's life insurance claim, citing
that same conspiracy theory. From there, she renewed her focus
on her work. In nineteen seventeen, she co founded Richmond's
chapter of the Double A CP and organized the collection
of relief supplies for World War One through St. Luke.
When the flu pandemic started in nineteen eighteen, she met

(29:52):
with the governor and got him to authorize an emergency hospital.
Her work on charity and relief efforts continued throughout the
pandemic and the First World War. In nineteen nineteen and
the wake of racist violence that became known as Red Summer,
which we've covered on the show before, Walker was part
of an interracial commission that was established to try to

(30:13):
prevent that violence. In nineteen twenty, after the nineteenth Amendment
to the Constitution went into effect, she led efforts to
try to register black women to vote. That year. When
the Republican Party ran an all white ticket in Virginia,
which was nicknamed the Lily White Ticket, Walker ran for
Superintendent of Public Instruction as part of a competing Lily

(30:36):
Black ticket that was of course made of all black candidates.
None of those candidates on that ticket were elected, though.
Walker's mother, Elizabeth, died on February twelve, and her son, Russell,
died on November twenty three after struggling with alcohol misuse,
and depression since the death of his father. In addition
to her profound grief, Walker was also experiencing progressive pain

(30:59):
and weakness in her legs. She started using leg braces.
It's not entirely clear whether this stemmed from her earlier
injuries or if it was a complication of diabetes, which
she had developed as well. An illness in compounded these issues,
and after that point she used a wheelchair. After she
started using a wheelchair, Walker had her home renovated to

(31:22):
make it more accessible. These renovations were managed by Charles Russell,
who was the first black architect to be licensed in Virginia,
and they included the installation of an elevator. Walker used
a standard wheelchair of the time when she was out
in public, but at home she had a custom built
cushioned chair on wheels that had a removable foot rest.

(31:42):
And a desk attachment. She also purchased a car that
was customized to be wheelchair accessible and she hired a
driver for it. Walker was obviously an incredibly hard worker
throughout her life, but she also did take vacations, including
two places like Hot Springs that offered her some relief
for her leg pain. In nineteen twenty five, Walker was
awarded an honorary master's degree from Virginia Union University, and

(32:06):
two years later many of the organizations she had been
involved with and otherwise supported declared October to be Maggie
Walker months. By the mid nineteen twenties, the Penny Saving
Bank had more than fifty thousand account holders, but in
nineteen twenty nine, that's the Great Depression was approaching, it
was clear that business was slowing down. Between nineteen twenty

(32:27):
nine and nineteen thirty one, it merged with two other
similarly struggling black owned banks in Richmond. Those were Second
Street Savings Bank and Commercial Bank and Trust. They formed
the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company. Unlike many many other banks,
this bank survived the Great Depression, as did the St.

(32:48):
Luke Harold, although it did have to drop from weekly
to monthly circulation. In nineteen thirty, Walker went to Florida
at the request of Mary McLoud Betune to talk about
establishing a national organization. That organization was the National Council
of Negro Women, which Bethune established five years later. Walker
did not live to see the start of this organization

(33:10):
do She died of complications from diabetes on December fifteenth,
nineteen thirty four, at the age of about seventy. Polly
Anderson Payne had really looked after her and her last years,
and Walker's reported last words were quote, have faith, have hope,
have courage, and carry on. Her funeral at First African

(33:31):
Baptist Church was enormous, with Richmond Public Schools observing a
half day, a processional of thousands of people, and an
honor guard made up of Boy Scouts and young people
from St. Luke and the Street Lamps and Jackson Ward
draped in black. Walker had continued to act as the
right Worthy Grand Secretary of the Independent Order of St.
Luke until the end of her life, and the time

(33:53):
that she was in that role, it had grown from
one thousand eighty members to a hundred thousand members in
twenty four states, and from a Treasury that had a
little more than thirty one dollars in it to having
more than a hundred thousand dollars in reserve. The Independent
Order of St. Luke continued as an organization until the
nineteen eighties. In nineteen seventy nine, the National Park Service

(34:17):
bought the Walker Home at one hundred ten and a
half East Lee Street, now the Walker Historic Home at
Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site. The Consolidated Bank and
Trust Company was the oldest black owned bank to be
in continual operation in the United States. Then in two
thousand five, it was sold to Abigail Adams National Bank Corps. Inc.

(34:40):
It remained its own business in that structure until two
thousand nine, when the Abigail Adams Corporation was sold to
Premier National Bankorps Incorporated of Huntington, West Virginia. Premier eventually
consolidated the Bank and Trust Company into its other operations.
In eleven, a statue you of Maggie NA. Walker was

(35:01):
erected in Richmond, and PayPal established an award named in
her honor, which recognizes quote achievements of underrepresented women who
are economically empowering their communities and creating a more inclusive world,
and that is Maggie Na Walker, so good, so incredible.

(35:23):
How much work one person did. I mean, she obviously
had a whole organization and people who reported to her
monumental achievements that had far reaching implications for her entire community. Yeah,
do you have a listener mail? I do. This note
came via Instagram. It is from Mallory. Instagram is not

(35:48):
usually a place where I see things and they get
retained in my mind. But I was so charmed by this,
and Mallory just said, listening to your first Autumn Unearthed
episode and your head stone fudge story reminded me of
this post. And Mallory had shared a post from Instagram
that was about a tombstone containing a fudge recipe. This

(36:14):
apparently went virals some time ago. I totally missed it.
I have no recollection of it at all until getting
this message from Mallory. The basic story here, though, is
that Katherine Andrews, who went by K, passed away back
in at the age of ninety seven, and she wanted
the whole world to have her fudge recipe, so it
is inscribed on her gravestone. If you want to get

(36:39):
this recipe, and make some fudge with it. You can
find it on various news outlets by googling Kay's Fudge
Tombstone or something similar like that. Um. It was initially
inscribed with a typo in it, though it called for
a tablespoon of vanilla extract instead of spoon. I mean
that's a lot. It's well and as a person who

(37:01):
who really loves vanilla extract, the issue was the texture
of the fudge that it created did not set up properly,
not the amount of vanilla flavor that it conveyed. So
thank you so much Mallory for sharing this. I had
totally never seen it until now, and now I kind
of want to go make some fudge. Although the fudge

(37:22):
recipe that has been used in my family is not
one that involves putting it on a marble slab, I
don't think now. I wish I had looked that up
before I came in here. UM. Anyway, thank you Mallory
for sharing that. If you would like to send us
an email where history podcast that I Heart radio dot com.

(37:42):
If you send us a message on Instagram, we might
see it. We might not. It's a little weird. No
shade for Mallory for having sent the message that way.
That was That was a post that was shared through Instagram.
We are all over social media. I miss in History,
which is where you'll find our Instagram as well as
our Facebook and our Twitter. And you can subscribe to
our show on iHeart radio app or wherever you like

(38:04):
to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
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