Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 7, No 4
Summer 1993

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

Constructing a Life and a Community: A Partial Story of Maggie Lena Walker

Elsa Barkley Brown

Maggie Lena Draper Mitchell Walker was born in Richmond, Virginia, ca. 1867 (2). Her mother, Elizabeth Dra-per, was a young domestic servant in the mansion of Civil War spy Elizabeth Van Lew. Her father, Eccles Cuthbert, was a northern white journalist who frequented the Van Lew house (3). Shortly after Maggie Lena’s birth, her mother married William Mitchell, a butler in the same household and soon-to-be waiter in the St. Charles Hotel. The family moved to College Alley, a location that put them within view of Broad Street, one of Richmond’s main thoroughfares, and just around the corner from First African Baptist Church, Richmond’s oldest and largest black congregation. By engaging in the social life of the neighborhood, Maggie Mitchell could witness firsthand many of the social and political activities of black Richmonders; she also became a fervent (and lifelong) member of First African (4).

As will be seen, Maggie Walker was in many ways a remarkable individual who influenced her Richmond community in profound ways, and as such she is certainly deserving of biographical treatment. Unfortunately, in the case of Maggie Walker, there are some gaps in the sources which historians have traditionally used to write biography. Many social historians, in fact, have encountered this problem in their wish to study individuals other than politicians, industrialists, and other elites. Fortunately, such problems can be surmounted by looking to different types of sources. In Walker’s case, community records viewed in conjunction with her diary and various personal papers provide important context for her life’s work. Although we still do not know all we would like to know about individuals like Maggie Walker, her story is important and should be told.

On the streets and especially in the church, Maggie Mitchell from an early age had a view of women engaging in public life, developing community institutions, and contesting race and gender prescriptions. African-American women during Walker’s time often faced dire economic straits. When she wanted to emphasize the paucity of jobs available to black women, especially as work in the city’s tobacco factories closed to them, she would point out that black women had only three occupations: domestic worker, teacher, and church builder. The last reference signaled how seriously she took the notions expressed years earlier; she continued to argue that women’s contributions were indeed a vital form of labor, even though unwaged.

In constructing her political arsenal, Maggie Mitchell Walker frequently turned to the church (6). Biblical language undergirded most of Walker’s speeches and scripture served as her most effective means of arguing for women’s rights (7). Certainly she had learned her Bible in First African but she may also have been influenced by the women who were known throughout the community as the authors of prominent male ministers’ sermons or those few women who themselves established reputations as “soul-stirring” preachers. One of these was the Rev. Mrs. Carter, of whom it was said, “Many fell out at her preaching” (8).

Maggie Walker’s prominence provided a sharp challenge to the complex gender relations that existed in the African-American community during the last years of the nineteenth century. A local black newspaper, the Richmond Planet, reported intra-racial gender disagreements as if they were commonplace occurrences. First African debated women’s attendance at church meetings. The Virginia Baptist saw a threat to “womanliness” when women exceeded their proper place in the church by attempting to preach and their proper place in the community by the “deplorable” effort to “exercise the right of suffrage” (9). Thus, by the early twentieth century when Walker had established her own leadership, things had not changed much within First African, and she was nearly unique in her ability to speak in church meetings and participate in church business. (She was chief financial advisor, developing the church budget.) Yet it would be hard not to imagine the women within her church and her community who petitioned, wrote sermons and preached establishing a precedent for Walker’s own sermonizing and her understanding of women’s rights.

Other communities of women also influenced her development. After William Mitchell’s mysterious death in 1876, Maggie helped her mother in her work as a laundress and with the care of her younger brother, Johnnie. Laundry work was a traditional occupation of African American women, especially married women who desired time at home to care for children and time to partake in community activities (10). Rather than confine themselves to their individual homes for a day of solitary drudgery, however, women often organized to collectively scrub, rinse, starch, iron, and fold the pounds of laundry. Some laundry women actually became entrepreneurs, contracting all of the work themselves and hiring the other women who worked with them (11). Many of these days spent scrubbing were also spent organizing; a number of churches, schools and recreational centers grew out of the discussions among washerwomen about the need for these community institutions (12).

Maggie Mitchell’s early start in the world of work was fairly typical for African-American children in the nineteenth century. In fact, Mitchell was quite fortunate for, despite the need for her to assist her mother, she was able to still attend school regularly. Many others had to forego schooling in order to contribute to the family income. Mitchell, however, graduated in 1883 from Colored High and Normal, becoming a teacher at Valley School that fall. It was perhaps the requirement that she relinquish her teaching assignment upon her 1886 marriage to Armstead Walker, a Colored High graduate and brick contractor, that pushed Walker into her business career.

Having studied accounting and sales while teaching, Walker joined several other women in founding the Woman’s Union insurance business. At the same time, she worked her way up through the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL), a mutual benefit society which she had joined at age fourteen, becoming an elected delegate at age sixteen and an elected officer by age seventeen. After her marriage, Walker devoted more time to the St. Lukes, traveling throughout Virginia and West Virginia to develop new Councils, and working to establish a juvenile branch of the Order in 1895. In 1899, Walker, by then the mother of two sons, became Grand Worthy Secretary, the highest executive officer of the IOSL. In 1903, she spearheaded the founding of St. Luke Penny Savings Bank and became its president. Three decades later, she would oversee its reorganization as the present-day Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, the oldest continuously existing black-owned and black-run bank in the country.

Maggie Lena Walker’s occupational and economic advancement was in one sense a singular success. On another level, however, her rise to schoolteacher represented the chief form of occupational advancement for black women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a number of other women from both poor and more well-to-do backgrounds had traveled this route (13). Walker was not alone among members of Richmond’s African-American community in pursuing other careers after marrying effectively prevented her from teaching. Sarah G. Jones, for example, left Richmond temporarily to attend Howard University Medical School and returned to develop a successful practice, becoming the first black woman physician in the state of Virginia (14).

Walker’s climb in mutual benefit society work, while more spectacular than most, also suggests a particular avenue for black women’s occupational and economic mobility. When Maggie Walker assumed the position of Grand Worthy Secretary in 1899, her “first work was to draw around me women.” In fact, after the executive board elections in 1901, six of the nine members were women (15). Walker’s plan to have the bank be run solely by women was thwarted when her inability to find an experienced black woman cashier allowed the men in the Order to insist that this not be totally a women’s venture (16). However, women were still instrumental; eight of the first nineteen directors of the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank were women.

A department store, set up by the IOSL in 1905, provided further opportunities for Richmond’s African-American community. The St. Luke Emporium, collectively formed by twenty-two women, aimed at providing quality goods at affordable prices, as well as a place where black women could earn a living and get a business education. The St. Luke Emporium employed fifteen women as salesclerks, an insignificant number in comparison to the thousands of black women working outside the home, but in the context of the occupational structure of Richmond, it represented a significant percentage of the white-collar and skilled working-class women in the community. In 1910, only 222 of the more than thirteen thousand employed black women listed their occupations as typists, stenographers, bookkeepers, and salesclerks. Black secretaries and clerks were entirely dependent on the financial stability of black businesses and, in this regard, the IOSL was especially important. With its fifty-five clerks in the home office, over one-third of the black female clerical workers in Richmond in the 1920s worked for this Order. The salaries of these clerical workers, moreover, often surpassed even those of teachers (17).

Additionally, black women worked for the St. Lukes, as for other mutual benefit societies, organizing adult and juvenile councils and recruiting members. Organizers were paid for each council organized and member recruited, and for travel expenses. Apart from the financial benefits it brought, the position allowed many African-American women in Richmond a significant amount of independence, visibility, and occasionally a foothold in politics. Lillian Payne, for example, one of the chief organizers for the St. Lukes, became a popular political speaker throughout the Northeast as a result of her organizing work (18). Whether working as clerks in the home office or organizers in the field, these women engaged in political and community work along with their St. Luke work. The work routine of the St. Luke Home Office regularly included detailing a segment of the clerks to community projects such as fund-raising for the Community House for Colored People, the Afro-American Old Folks Home, the Friends Orphan Asylum, the Council of Colored Women, and the NAACP (19).

Many of these women faced with Walker the challenge of balancing a home life with a professional life outside the home. Even among those African-American women who were married and had children, a significant portion engaged in wage labor. Additionally, it was more common for middle-class black clubwomen to be married and to have children than for middle-class white women undertaking club and community work (20). Walker’s balancing efforts were not altogether successful, as surely many women’s were not. And her life was not without its tragedy and scandal. In 1915, her eldest son, Russell, shot and killed his father. After a sensational trial Russell was acquitted, the death ruled accidental. Yet the trial itself, combined with Walker’s few scattered and cryptic diaries, is the best evidence we have of life inside the Walker home, where Maggie Walker lived at various times with her mother, relative/housekeeper, husband, two sons, and later their wives and children. The evidence points to a household that pivoted around a prominent and successful businesswoman: her husband spent much of his time away from home, rumors of a liaison between Maggie Walker and another man persisted, and her sons were disgruntled at the amount of attention and funds their mother expended on other people’s children. Becoming prominent and successful (or even just engaging in community and/or wage work) had its personal costs. Maggie Walker seems to have paid them—usually quietly, privately, and for a few months, quite publicly (21).

This is but a small part of Maggie Lena Walker’s story. But examining the life of one black woman prominent in her time and little-known in historical scholarship suggests ways to take other women and use the reconstruction of their lives to explore African American women’s history and the internal dynamics of African American community life.

1. Maggie Lena Walker, “Stumbling Blocks,” Second Baptist Church, February 17, 1907, bound in Maggie Lena Walker, Addresses 1909, Mag-gie Lena Walker Papers, Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site, Richmond, Virginia (hereafter MLW Papers).

2. The traditional date given for Walker’s birth is 15 July 1867; however, Gertrude Marlowe, Director of the Maggie Lena Walker Biography Project, Department of Anthropology, Howard University, suggests that her actual year of birth was probably two years earlier. Marlowe, “Mag-gie Lena Walker,” in Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1993), 1214.

3. For basic biographical information on Walker, see Wendell P. Dabney, Maggie L. Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke: The Woman and Her Work (Cincinnati: Dabney, 1927); Marlowe, “Maggie Lena Walker,” 1214-1219; Sadie Iola Daniel, Women Builders (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1931), 28-52. On her political thought, see Elsa Barkley Brown, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke,” Signs 14 (Spring 1989): 610-633.

4. For an excellent discussion of the network of institutions—church, mutual benefit societies, and families—in post-Civil War black Richmond, see Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1890 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), especially chapter 2.

5. For an eyewitness account of the women’s drills, see Wendell P. Dabney, “Rough autobiographical sketch of boyhood years,” n.d. (microfilm), Wendell Phillips Dabney Papers, Folder 3, Cincinnati Historical Society, Cincinnati, Ohio. Dabney was a boyhood friend of Walker.

6. Debates over gender roles within black churches occured on congregational and denominational levels. Church minutes are an excellent source for examining gender relations within the black community; in addition to the division of labor within the church and church policy, one can also examine the disciplinary measures taken against men and women for various offenses. First African’s minutes, 1841-1930, are available on microfilm at the Archives Division, Virginia State Library, Richmond, Virginia. For studies which examine these debates at the state and/or national level, see, for example, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Glenda Gilmore, “Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1992 (on the A.M.E. Zion); Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “‘Together and in Harness’: Women’s Traditions in the Sanctified Church,” Signs 10 (Summer 1985): 678-699.

7. Maggie Lena Walker, “Speech to the Negro Young People’s Christian and Educational Congress,” Convention Hall, Washington, D.C., August 5, 1906; “Women at the Sepulchre,” both in MLW Papers, Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site, Richmond, Virginia.

8. Richmond Planet, 26 July 1890, 17 and 24 September 1898, 19 November 1898, and 9 September 1899.

9. Virginia Baptist cited in Woman’s Era, 1 and 6 September 1894.

10. An excellent study of black domestic and personal service workers, including laundresses, is Tera W. Hunter, “Household Workers in the Making: Afro-American Women in Atlanta and the New South, 1861 to 1920” (Ph.D. Diss., Yale University, 1990). See also, Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and Family From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

11. For examples of laundry women who became entreprenuers, see Elsa Barkley Brown, “Mothers of Mind,” Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 6 (Summer 1989): 7; Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1988), 23-24.

12. See, for example, the 1896 founding of St. James Baptist Church which grew out of the discussions of three women’s discussions as they did their laundry about the need in their area for a “building to be used as a Sunday School and a place for community entertainment.” The resulting building also served as a school. Rev. D. J. Bradford, “An Historical Sketch of St. James Baptist Church, Goochland County, Va.,” (typescript, n.d.), St. James Baptist Church.

13. An examination of any black college’s records—catalogues, alumni correspondence, school newspapers, etc.—will demonstrate the number of black women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who came from, often were sent by, impoverished families and communities to train for teaching. They will also, obviously, suggest the curriculum the women took and report on their activities in their careers, communities, and families after leaving the school.

14. Interestingly, Jones’ husband, Miles, followed her example, left his teaching assignment to attend Howard and returned to practice medicine alongside his wife. For a biographical sketch of Jones, see Richmond Planet, 26 January 1895.

15. Maggie Lena Walker, Diary, 6 March 1928, MLW Papers; 50th Anniversary—Golden Jubilee Historical Report of the R.W.G. Council of the I. O. St. Luke, 1867-1917 (Richmond, Va.: Everett Waddey, 1917), 41.

16. William Sydnor, “Early Leadership with the Independent Order of Saint Luke,” presentation at “Maggie Lena Walker: Perspectives in Her Innovative Leadership,” Symposium, Richmond, Virginia, July 18, 1992.

17. This paragraph is taken from Brown, “Womanist Consciousness,” 610-633. Nevertheless, black women in Richmond, as elsewhere, overwhelmingly remained in employed in domestic service.

18. See Lillian Payne Papers, Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia.

19. See, for example, Maggie Lena Walker, Diary, 30 and 31 January 1920, January 1920 memoranda. See also Lillian Payne Papers.

20. Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women’s Welfare Activism, 1890-1945,” Journal of Amercian History 78 (September 1991): 559-590.

21. See Walker, Diaries, esp. 1925; Richmond Planet, June-November 1915.

Elsa Barkley Brown is an Instructor in history and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Her essays have appeared in Signs, Feminist Studies, Sage, and the History Workshop Journal. The current essay is selected from her larger study of blacks in Richmond, Virginia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.