15. Christopher Robert Reed, Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900-1919 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), 174.
16. Ibid.
17. “Chicago’s Only Banker," Chicago Defender, December 23, 1911. As noted by a contemporary historian, Binga’s bank “marked the first attempt of Negroes to do a strictly commercial banking business in a Northern city." Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 77-78.
18. In Chicago, one black home was bombed every twenty days between 1917 and 1921, a total of fifty-eight homes in three years. St. Clair Drake and Horace
Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 178-179; Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 177-178.
19. Katz, Negro in Chicago, 131.
20. “I am an American citizen, a Christian and a property owner. No man can make of me a traitor or a coward. No power on earth can change my faith in God. I will defend my home and personal liberty to the extent of my life.” “Chicago’s Only Banker,” Chicago Defender, December 23, 1911.
21. Carl R. Osthaus, “The Rise and Fall of Jesse Binga,” Journal of Negro History 58(1) (January 1973): 43. “Banks or banking associations may be organized under the provisions of this Act in all cities, towns, and villages with a minimum capital stock . . . in all cities and towns of fifty thousand inhabitants or more, of two hundred thousand dollars.” 16a 111. Comp. Stat. 683 (1913).
22. Christopher Robert Reed, The Depression Comes to the South Side: Protest and Politics in the Black Metropolis, 1930-1933 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 18-19.
23. Charles W. Calomiris, “Runs on Banks and the Lessons of the Great Depression,” Regulation 22(1) (1999), http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files /regulation/1999/4/deplesson.pdf.
24. Reed, Depression Comes to the South Side.
25. Lash, “Asymmetries in US Banking,” 95. See Charles Gerena, “Opening the Vault: Black-Owned Banks Have a Long History of Providing Financial Services to Underserved Communities, but How Important Are They in Today’s Market?,” St. Louis Federal Reserve Review, Spring 2007, 48.
26. Illinois Banking Commission, Bank Resources and Liabilities, 1929-1930.
27. John A. Carroll, “The Great American Bubble,” Real America Magazine, April 1935, 16-20. The author was a former president of the Chicago and Cook County Bankers Association. In addition, when Binga asked Mr. Brown, first vice president of First National Bank of Chicago for assistance, Brown derided Binga, saying, “Why you are no banker.” Hurt and confused, Binga believed Brown blocked every effort he afterward made to save the bank. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 162.
28. Calomiris, “Runs on Banks and the Lessons of the Great Depression”; Elmus Wicker, The Banking Panics of the Great Depression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86. Reed, Depression Comes to the South Side, 18-19.
29. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Binga,” The Crisis, December 1930, 425.
30. Reed, Depression Comes to the South Side, 19.
31. Dempsey Travis, An Autobiography of Black Chicago (Evanston, IL: Agate,
2013), 45.
32. Ibid., 51.
33. Robert Lynn Fuller, “Phantom ofFear”: The Banking Panic of1933 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2012), 63-64; Jason Breslow, “Were Bankers Jailed in Past Financial Crises?,” Frontline, January 22, 2013, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh /frontline/article/were-bankers-jailed-in-past-financial-crises/.
34. Patricia Carter Sluby, The Entrepreneurial Spirit of African American Inventors (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), 59-60.
35. Ibid.
36. Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 79. The advantage of affiliation was the power to rediscount (exchange a negotiable debt instrument for a second time to increase market liquidity), the right to hold Federal Reserve notes paying 6 percent interest, access to minimal liquidity protection, and of course, the prestige that accompanied membership.
37. Earl Louis Brown, “Negro Banks in the United States” (M.A. thesis, Boston University, 1930), 49.
38. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 145, 162-163.
39. Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 133.
40. “Historic Census Browser," University of Virginia Library, http://mapserver.lib .virginia.edu/.
41. New York Age, April 13, 1916, 2.
42. Sun and New York Herald, May 23, 1920, 84.
43. Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 133. New York Tribune, January 27, 1920, 23.
44. New York Age, October 5, 1916, 1.
45. By December 1928, seven New York banks (the Dunbar National Bank, the Chelsea Exchange Bank, the Corn Exchange Bank, the Empire City Savings Bank, the Chatham and Phoenix National Bank and Trust, the Chase National Bank, and the Colonial Bank) were all listed as banks with savings departments “conveniently located" for blacks in New York, though none were lending to blacks at the time. New York Age, December 15, 1928, 2.
46. Ibid.
47. Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 133.
48. Arnett G. Lindsay, “The Negro in Banking," Journal of Negro History 14(2) (April 1929): 198.
49. Minimum capital requirements were roughly the same for banks in New York and Illinois. N.Y. Banking Law § 60(3) (Consol. 1909); 16a 111. Comp. Stat. 683 (1913). The state’s discretion was more robust in New York than in Illinois and Massachusetts—in New York, the bank superintendent could deny a banking charter for any reason if he was not satisfied with the character of bank managers. N.Y. Banking Law § 8 (Consol. 1909). N.Y. Banking Law § 63 (Consol. 1909). “The Auditor may, in his discretion, withhold the issuing of the said certificate authorizing the commencement of business when he is not satisfied as to the personal character and standing of the officers or directors elected or appointed, in accordance with sections three and four of this Act; or when he has reason to believe that this bank is organized for any purpose other than that contemplated by this Act." 16a 1ll. Comp. Stat. 677 (1913); Mass. Gen. Laws 168 § 8 (1921).
50. New York Age, February 17, 1923, 1.
51. Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 133. The newspaper reported that “A short-order restaurant now occupies the quarters which were intended for the bank, and the rest of the building is used for offices and furnished room accommodations." New York Age, February 17, 1923, 2.
52. Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 133.
53. New York Age, April 13, 1916, 2.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. New York Age, October 6, 1923, 1.
57. New YorkAge, January 26, 1924, 1.
58. New York Age, October 6, 1923, 1. These accounts required a $200 initial deposit. Of the bank’s special interest or savings department, African Americans made up 85 to 90 percent of the bank’s clientele.
59. Ibid.
60. New York Age, July 10, 1920, 1.
61. Ibid., 1.
62. Brown, “Negro Banks," 28.
63. Ibid.
64. Arthur I. Blaustein, Star Spangled Hustle (Doubleday, 1972), 72.
65. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, quoted in ibid., 76.
66. Brown, “Negro Banks," 25-26, 28.
67. “Report of Opening of the Bank," Time, September 24, 1928.
68. Ibid.
69. The bank’s balance sheet statements from 1928 to 1933 suggest it maintained stability through the Great Depression because it invested heavily in safe government securities. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Individual Statements of Condition of National Banks at the Close of Business 1932, 1933 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933).
70. “The Cooperative aVery Present Help in Time of Trouble," Dunbar News, March 9, 1932.
71. Lindsay, “Negro in Banking," 200.
72. New YorkAge, September 22, 1928, 1.
/> 73. Ibid.
74. “Business & Finance: Harlem Bank," Time, September 24, 1928.
75. New York Age, September 24, 1932, 1. Announcing the opening of the bank, William R. Conklin, the agent for the bank’s organizers, stated that the bank “would fill a longfelt want" of blacks in Harlem. New York Age, August 18, 1928, 2.
76. New York Age, July 15, 1933, 4. “Business & Finance: Harlem Bank," Time, September 24, 1928.
77. “Work, Waste, Wealth: Dunbar Bank," The Crisis, August 1933, 186.
78. New York Age, September 22, 1928, 1; April 6, 1929, 1. In 1929, Fred. R. Moore, editor of the New York Age, and Dr. Robert Russ Moton, principal of the Tuskegee Institute, both accepted invitations to serve as members of the bank’s board of directors.
79. Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 133-136.
80. New York Age, July 15, 1933, 4; July 8, 1933, 1. On July 10, 1933, the Dunbar National Bank opened a new branch for the residents of Harlem. The additional quarters were located at 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, in “the quarters previously occupied by the Mercantile Bank and Trust Company."
81. “Dunbar Apartments," We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement, http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/civilrights/ny2.htm.
82. Aberjhani and Sandra West, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Checkmark Books, 2003), 265. Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990), 341.
83. Aberjhani and West, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, 265. “Dunbar Bank Closes," Afro-American, April 30, 1938, https://news.google.com/newspapers ?nid=2211&dat=19380430&id=yQQnAAAAIBAJ&sjid=SAMGAAAAIBAJ&pg =6066,1912328&hl=en.
84. The first black nationalist was Martin Delaney a pre-Civil War abolitionist who urged blacks to return to Africa instead of trying to make it work in the United States.
85. Marcus Garvey, “The Negro’s Greatest Enemy," September 1923, cited in “Chapter in Autobiography," The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, ed. Robert A. Hill, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 5.
86. Camilo Jose Vergara, Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 292.
87. Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Penguin Books,
2011), chap. 1. “Marcus Garvey Timeline," American Experience, http://www.pbs .org/wgbh/amex/garvey/timeline/timeline2.html.
88. David Van Leeuwen, “Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association," http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/garvey .htm.
89. Marcus Garvey, Life and Lessons: A Centennial Companion to the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, eds. Robert Abraham Hill and Barbara Blair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xxvii.
90. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 131. Marcus Garvey, “West Indies in the Mirror of Truth," Champion Magazine, January 1917.
91. Marable, Malcolm X.
92. Richard R. Wright Jr., “The Financial Condition of Our People," Address before the Philadelphia Preachers’ meeting, Christian Recorder, May 19, 1921.
93. Alexa Benson Henderson, “Richard Wright and the National Negro Banking Association: Early Organizing Efforts among Black Bankers, 1924-1942," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 117(1/2) (January-April 1993): 54,
59. St. Louis Argus, September 30, 1932, Tuskegee Institute News Clipping File. http://www.nationalbankers.org/history.htm. The organization changed its name to the National Bankers Association (NBA) in 1948.
94. Kevin F. Modesto, “ ‘Won’t Be Weighted Down’: Richard R. Wright, Jr.’s Contributions to Social Work and Social Welfare," Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 31(2) (June 2004), http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article =2984&context=jssw.
95. St. Louis Argus, September 30, 1932, Tuskegee Institute News Clipping File.
96. “History," National Bankers Association, http://www.nationalbankers.org /history.htm.
97. Pittsburgh Courier, September 24, 1927.
98. “Richard R. Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association: Early Organizing Efforts among Black Bankers, 1924-1942," Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography, CXVII(1-2) (January /April 1993), https://journals.psu.edu /pmhb/article/viewFile/44835/44556.
99. Pittsburgh Courier, September 24, 1927.
100. Brown, “Negro Banks," 30.
101. Some 9,000 banks failed during the Great Depression. David C. Wheelock, “Regulation, Market Structure, and the Bank Failures of the Great Depression," St. Louis Federal Reserve Review, March / April 1998, 27.
102. “Richard R. Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association," 63.
103. Norfolk Journal and Guide, July 23, 1927.
104. “Richard R. Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association," 65-66.
105. For a history of Coolidge and Thrift Week, see Sheldon Garon, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
106. Robert E. Weems, Business in Black and White: American Presidents and Black Entrepreneurs in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2009), chap. 1.
107. NNBL Minutes, 1932. “The attitude taken by Mr. Spaulding when he came to the rescue of the Citizens Trust Company was that of maintaining confidence throughout the entire Negro commercial and insurance field." Brown, “Negro Banks," 39.
108. It also became the first African American-owned bank to be FDIC-insured after the Great Depression. Willard C. Lewis, “Citizens Trust Bank," New Georgia Encyclopedia, August 26, 2013, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles /business-economy/citizens-trust-bank. Harmon et al., Negro as a Businessman, 74-75. Brown, “Negro Banks," 38.
109. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 61. “Richard R. Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association." Juliet E. K. Walker, The History of Black Business (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 13. In the 1992 reprint of Harris’s The Negro as Capitalist, the editors say eight survived.
110. Jesse Binga remarked, “Why, there is a house which I once offered $22,000 for and could not get it. Today it could not be sold for $6,000." Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 168-169. A 2013 study from the London School of Economics on the causes of bank failures in Chicago during the Great Depression found that “banks which failed the earliest in the 1930s had invested more in nonliquid assets (in particular, mortgages) in the 1920s.” Natacha Posten-Vinay, “What Caused Chicago Bank Failures in the Great Depression? A Look at the 1920s,” London School of Economics, Department of Economic History, June 2013.
111. “Richard R. Wright and the National Negro Bankers Association,” 72.
112. Harmon et al., Negro as a Business Man, 72.
113. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 54; Brown, “Negro Banks”; Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1933), 40. Illinois Banking Commissioner Balance Sheets 1922-1932. In his review of the balance sheets of the largest black-owned banks from 1903 to 1930, Harris shows that the average capital investment to total deposit ratios for black banks were higher than industry norms for the same period. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 5758, 156, 163-164, 144-145.
114. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 54; Brown, “Negro Banks.”
115. Other banks, too, had poor customers, but they were able to diversify their deposits and loans such that the accounts of the poor did not dominate their balance sheets.
116. Capital is a measure of the owners’ or total shareholders’ equity or ownership interest in the bank. Capital is a measurement used to indicate the proportion by which a bank’s assets (mainly loans out to borrowers) exceed a bank’s liabilities (mainly deposits). In short: Assets - Liabilities = Capital. “The ratio of capital investment to total deposits . . . averaged 32.9 per cent from 1903 to 1930. In state banks the norm should have be about 18 per ce
nt. In brief, the banks under consideration should have had a large deposit business. This weakness was paralleled.” Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 59.
117. Ibid., 58-59.
118. Total cash / demand deposits ratio for black banks averaged 41.4 percent for the years 1910-1930, compared with the industry norm of 35 percent. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 57-59.
119. Higher leverage means higher risk, but also higher profits. Capital acts as a buffer against loss to depositors and other counterparties because the higher the equity / capital, the more losses are borne by bank owners and shareholders before being passed on to depositors. Anat Admati, The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
120. Robert L. Boyd, “Black Business Transformation, Black Well-Being, and Public Policy,” Population Research and Policy Review 9(2) (1990): 117-132, 119. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40229887?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 172. Before 1930, blacks were still excluded from the trading houses where securities were exchanged, so they held few securities. Black banks did hold some U.S. treasury notes, and the Binga and Douglass banks held a few private bonds in large white enterprises and a few black-owned businesses. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 146, 159. For a detailed list of securities held by the Douglass and Binga banks at the time of receivership, see Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 146-147 and 159-160, respectively.
121. “Negroes pay about two per cent more for money than white business men on ordinary loans, about fourteen per cent for first mortgage loans, and much more for second mortgages.” J. H. Harmon Jr., “The Negro as a Local Business Man,” Journal of Negro History 14(2) (April 1929): 153. As explained by a contemporary account, white banks did not like to lend to black borrowers primarily due to “the liquidity of the loans as indicated by the marketability of the property which secures them.” Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 56.
122. Kenneth A. Snowden, “Mortgage Banking in the United States, 1870-1940," Research Institute for Housing America, Research Paper No. 13-02 (November 2013), 54, 58. Joseph Morton, Urban Mortgage Lending: Comparative Markets and Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 149-155.
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