How Black Americans in the South Boldly Defied Jim Crow to Build Business Empires of Their Own

On a cool March afternoon in 1906, Maggie Lena Walker stood before the leading Black men of Richmond, Virginia, and dared them to tame a beast. 

“My friends, there is a lion terrorizing us, preying upon us, and upon every business effort which we put forth,” she said. “The name of this insatiable lion is prejudice.” 

Walker’s voice boomed on the final word. An enterprising woman, the 41-year-old had grown a small fraternal society, the Independent Order of St. Luke, into one of the most prominent in the nation, with a membership of 20,000 people. She had also opened a department store, the St. Luke Emporium, in downtown Richmond, as well as a bank, the St. Luke Penny Savings, which was the first in the nation chartered by a Black woman. 

But she saw that the door of opportunity opened by her entrepreneurship was being slammed shut by racism. Local white merchants had aligned against her department store, pressuring wholesalers to price-gouge Walker for goods. Virginia’s recently enacted state constitution mandated segregated schools, while a new state law allowed for segregated streetcars. “Every legislature in the South legislates against the Negro,” Walker declared, “and the effect of this same legislation is felt throughout the length and breadth of this country.”

Jim Crow laws restricted Black mobility at the same time as angry white mobs reached beyond the law to claim Black lives. No wonder that Black people soon began charting their escape routes. In Virginia alone, in the first decade of the 1900s, nearly 40,000 Black residents left the state, a pattern soon mirrored by Black people across the South. 

Walker, however, wasn’t going anywhere. She was ready for a fight. “Whenever the sunset of my life does come, it will be with the consciousness that I have striven and toiled night and day,” she said. “Not alone to build this pile of brick which towers up and around and above us, but with the thought ever pressing upon me to help provide some means of employment for our women and our children.”

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The story of Black America in the first half of the 20th century is often focused on desperate efforts to escape the South. Between 1916 and 1970, an estimated six million Black Southerners journeyed north or west in search of a fairer shake in life, an exodus now known as the Great Migration. These migrants incubated a world-shifting arts scene in Harlem. They manned auto assembly lines in Detroit. They worked in wartime shipyards in Los Angeles. 

I spent the past five years researching the history of another Black community, the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that thrived thanks to the ingenuity of Black migrants who came from places like Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. Greenwood was celebrated as a symbol of Black wealth and independence, earning the legendary nickname Black Wall Street. In 2023, I published a book about the neighborhood called Built From the Fire, exploring how Greenwood used entrepreneurship to strengthen community ties and build political power. During my research, however, I was surprised to find that the Black communities that reminded me most of Greenwood—places where Black independence flowered through land ownership and enterprise—weren’t in cities like New York and Chicago. They were in the South, in places where Black Southerners found a way to carve out opportunity not far from the places where their families had been enslaved. Cities like Richmond, Virginia; Durham, North Carolina; and Birmingham, Alabama, each benefited from Great Migrations in miniature, swelling with Black migrants from nearby rural areas who were pursuing grand ambitions or sometimes simply needed steady work. The Black population of each of these cities grew by at least 60 percent in the first three decades of the 20th century—nearly double the growth rate of the Black population overall in the United States during that time. In fact, the Black population in cities across the South grew by 1.2 million between 1910 and 1930. Across the rest of the country, during the same period, the Black population in cities grew by 1.3 million, a difference of just 100,000 people.

These Southern cities cultivated entrepreneurs in fields such as banking, insurance and retail at about the same rate as Northern cities, according to a study by Robert L. Boyd, a sociologist at Mississippi State University. And in states such as Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky, roughly a third of Black people owned their homes, well above the national average of 22 percent for Black families. While some Black people remained in the South because they lacked the means to leave, for others staying was a choice. “There’s this phenomenon in migration where the people who tend to stay behind are either the people who are near the top of the socioeconomic structure or near the bottom,” Boyd told me. “Businesspeople and professionals stay where they are if they have built up a clientele. And that was certainly true in a lot of the major Southern cities.”

Still, Southern Black entrepreneurs faced obstacles that their Northern peers didn’t—namely, a rigid caste system that cut them out of politics and viewed efforts at prosperity as a threat to white supremacy. Black people tried to use wealth as a tool for liberation, building on the ideology of the South’s most influential Black intellectual, Booker T. Washington. But the approach had its limits. A Black town could see all its wealth turned to ash, as Greenwood did during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when a white mob leveled the neighborhood and killed as many as 300 people. And for all the money Black professionals could accrue in a segregated economy, they could not buy their children access to better-funded white schools, nor even a sandwich at a whites-only lunch counter.

The fact that Black Southerners found success despite these injustices makes their lives even more remarkable. They fought on an uneven playing field, but they fought all the same. Their visions for achieving progress varied. In Richmond, Maggie Walker and other Black leaders confronted the white power structure head-on. Durham’s Black leaders, led by Charles C. Spaulding, used calculated appeasement of white interests to build the country’s biggest Black enterprise, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. And in Birmingham, a Black mogul named A.G. Gaston was forced to reconcile these opposing philosophies while the civil rights movement unfolded. No matter the model, though, the goal was the same: figuring out a way for Black people to become self-sufficient in a part of the country that had been built on their subjugation. 

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Richmond, Virginia

Maggie Walker was born free in Richmond in 1864, when enslaved people still toiled in the White House of the Confederacy a few miles away. The daughter of a freed slave and an Irish immigrant and Confederate soldier (the nature of their relationship isn’t known), her very birth disrupted Southern precepts about Black inferiority. 

Walker’s first exposure to entrepreneurship came as a girl, helping her mother deliver clothes for her modest laundry business. After graduating high school, she became a teacher, but she studied accounting and sales in her free time. Eager to become more involved in Richmond’s fast-growing Black community, she joined the Independent Order of St. Luke, a struggling Black fraternal organization that had been founded in 1869. 

After the Civil War, fraternal organizations helped form the bedrock of what would eventually become the Black middle class. Far more than social clubs or secret societies, these groups built community gathering places, ran charity drives and pioneered early forms of life insurance. Groups like the Colored Knights of Pythias and the Prince Hall Masons amassed hundreds of thousands of members across the country. The Independent Order of St. Luke was less successful, with a steadily dwindling membership and growing debt. 

Walker joined the organization as a teenager and soon led efforts at youth organizing. In 1899, at age 35, she became head of the order, a rarity for a woman at the time, and laid out a vision to transform it into the nerve center of Black commerce in Richmond. In a 1901 speech, she announced plans to launch a newspaper, open a department store and build a bank to seed financial security among her neighbors. These efforts would keep Black dollars circulating within the Black community. “Let us put our moneys together … and reap the benefit ourselves,” she said.

Richmond was the perfect place for an ambitious Black entrepreneur like Walker. The city’s Jackson Ward neighborhood, populated by Richmond’s free Black residents before the Civil War, was at the start of the 20th century becoming a beacon of Black enterprise and creativity. On Second Street, also known as “The Deuce,” Black dressmakers and repairmen worked alongside doctors and attorneys. There was a Black-owned bank, three Black-owned insurance companies and three Black benevolent societies within a three-block radius. A lively nightlife district filled with clubs and pool halls was anchored by the Hippodrome Theater. Like Tulsa’s Greenwood District, the area would eventually earn proud nicknames that highlighted its success, the “Harlem of the South” and the “Birthplace of Black Capitalism” among them.

Walker lived just off Second Street in a two-story home modeled after an Italian villa. At her fraternal society’s nearby headquarters, St. Luke Hall, she gathered Richmond’s Black leaders and printed her organization’s newspaper, the St. Luke Herald, on a printing press in the basement. Her bank, the St. Luke Penny Savings, opened in 1903. Members of the Order of St. Luke made up many of her early clients, but so did people in Black Richmond’s working class. On the bank’s first day of business, one depositor opened an account with just 31 cents. By the end of the 1910s, deposits would reach nearly $380,000 (or more than $6 million in 2024 dollars). 

As Walker’s status rose, so did the bite of her voice. The very first issue of the St. Luke Herald, in 1902, railed against mob lynchings and Jim Crow policies. In 1904, half a century before the Montgomery bus boycott, Walker helped organize boycotts of Richmond’s streetcars to protest a new segregation law. When a group of white businessmen tried to bribe her with $10,000 to cancel her plans to open her department store, which was located on Richmond’s main commercial thoroughfare, she refused. Later, she spearheaded voting drives for women after the passage of the 19th Amendment. John Mitchell Jr., editor of the Richmond Planet and a fierce critic of Richmond’s white power structure, was a close political ally of Walker’s. During state elections in 1921, the pair ran together on a Republican ticket, with Walker seeking to become the education superintendent. (They lost, along with the rest of the Black candidates.) 

Despite earning great wealth in a segregated economy, Walker was not content to stay silent about the rot in the system. “Somebody must speak,” she said. “The afflictions and persecutions of our people must be told. We must get together and reason together. Somebody must cry out.” She saw that prosperity for her people would always be constrained by limits on Black education and political involvement. Indeed, Richmond’s white leadership was clear about its intention to stifle Black economic and political power. The boundaries of the Jackson Ward neighborhood were the result of political gerrymandering in 1871, when the Richmond City Council carved out a single voting district for Black residents, seeking to ensure they would never gain wide representation in local government. At the state level, the 1902 Virginia constitutional convention enacted a poll tax with the explicit purpose of the “elimination of every Negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.” In the face of such racism, Walker, along with her friend Mitchell—who bravely railed against mob violence in the Richmond Planet when a victim, Black or white, was lynched—carried a streak of defiance that was uncommon among Black business leaders of her era. 

In many parts of the South, Black leaders often sought to avoid direct confrontation with the white business class, which sometimes included members of racial terror groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. A more intimate familiarity with white brutality compelled Black leaders to tread more carefully.

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Durham, North Carolina

Charles C. Spaulding was an ambitious man, but a cautious one. Growing up in North Carolina in the aftermath of Reconstruction, he had to be. In 1898, when Spaulding was 24, an armed mob of as many as 2,000 white people attacked the town of Wilmington, North Carolina, killing as many as 60 Black people. The violence was not chaotic; it was calculated. Local white politicians were angry that Black men had won elected offices in the town and were aiming to remove them through bloodshed. The brazen plan worked. The attack on Wilmington is thought to be the only successful governmental coup d’état in the history of the United States.

Spaulding was living 150 miles from Wilmington when the coup took place, in the fast-growing tobacco town of Durham. He was not personally terrorized when the mob installed a white supremacist government in Wilmington, but the coup would color his approach to business and politics in North Carolina all the same. 

That year, Spaulding’s uncle, Aaron Moore, and a Durham barbershop owner named John Merrick co-founded an insurance company called the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association (later known as the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company). The firm aimed to take the social welfare mission of fraternal organizations and implement it on a grander scale. Their first business was selling burial insurance policies, which were often too expensive for Black customers to buy from white-owned firms. Moore and Merrick soon hired young Spaulding as the company’s first general manager. The trio realized they could use insurance as a launchpad for all kinds of community development, such as selling real estate, building hospitals and investing in the business ideas of other Black entrepreneurs.  

Within a few years, North Carolina Mutual had agents selling life insurance policies to Black workers across the state. By 1920, the firm held roughly $1 million in total assets, employing nearly 1,100 people in an empire that stretched from Virginia all the way to Oklahoma. For the agents, who earned hefty commissions from the policies they sold, working at North Carolina Mutual was like running their own small business in miniature. The operation encouraged entrepreneurial thinking at every step. It was an incubator for some of the most prominent Black economic minds of the 20th century—Robert Weaver, the first Black person to be appointed to a presidential cabinet, under Lyndon B. Johnson, worked at the Mutual briefly as a young professional. 

As North Carolina Mutual grew, Black Durham benefited from the largesse that Spaulding and his business partners were generating. The company helped to fund a Black library and multiple local newspapers. It even sponsored a baseball team. But Black Durham’s enterprises also extended beyond the company’s coffers. On Parrish Street, Black businesses lined a four-block thoroughfare, and others could be found in the nearby all-Black neighborhood of Hayti. When the famed Black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois visited Durham in the 1910s, he counted five manufacturing plants, a building and loan association, a real estate company, a bank, and three insurance companies. All were Black-owned. “In Durham,” he wrote, “a Black man may get up in the morning from a mattress made by Black men, in a house which a Black man built out of lumber which Black men cut and planed. … He may earn his living working for colored men, be sick in a colored hospital and buried from a colored church. … This is surely progress.”

In 1921, North Carolina Mutual opened a gleaming new six-story headquarters on Parrish Street. With its marble trim and metallic doors, the structure was “a literal monument to ‘Negro progress,’” the historian Walter Weare wrote in Black Business in the New South, a book on the legacy of the insurance firm. But, not by accident, the majestic high-rise was only the second-tallest building in the city; company directors had carefully checked their measurements to ensure their new office would not eclipse Durham’s largest white-owned structure. At the new headquarters’ grand opening ceremony that December, the keynote speaker derided “political agitators” in the Black community and celebrated Spaulding and other “captains of industry.” The speech came just six months after a white mob had laid waste to Greenwood, violently rebuking calls for social equality, political rights and the end of renegade lynch law. North Carolina Mutual’s leaders were signaling they would be making no such demands. 

Many observers of race relations in Durham, including Du Bois, noted that white leaders there seemed receptive to Black success. North Carolina Mutual received early loans from a local white bank, and an apocryphal story passed down in white Durham said that tobacco magnate Washington Duke gifted the idea for the Mutual insurance company to Black leaders in an act of paternal wisdom. Such myths helped maintain a comfort with Black success that could still be traced back to white benevolence. But this white support was conditioned on the promise that Durham’s Black business class would remain deeply apolitical, in the mold of Booker T. Washington. Julian Carr, a white cotton mogul who backed multiple Black Durham businesses, argued that Black people needed to be “[weaned] … from believing that politics is their calling by nature.” He praised Washington’s “gospel of faith and work,” while warning a local Black audience, “If the Negro is to continue making politics his chief aim … there can be but one ending.”

For the most part, Spaulding and North Carolina Mutual followed the appointed script. None of the company’s endeavors interfered with Durham’s true moneymaker, tobacco, and leaders like Spaulding did not attempt to take political office, as Maggie Walker had in Richmond and as Black people had a generation before in Wilmington. Spaulding always operated with the knowledge that he had to survive within the white power structure rather than try to dismantle it. “When we began, we didn’t have a thing,” he recalled late in his life. “We had no money, no knowledge. But we had sense enough to put up a big front of respectability.”

Conrad Pearson, a Black Durham attorney born three decades after Spaulding, observed a generational divide between the Black leaders who remembered the Wilmington coup firsthand and those who didn’t. “The people who were closely related to the Reconstruction problems naturally were cautious, for fear that there might be repercussions like they had in Wilmington,” he reflected in an oral history in the 1970s. “And then you had the younger generation. … And they didn’t care about any repercussions. And that was the division in the Negro community.”

By the 1930s and ’40s, Black politics were beginning to shift nationally—and in Durham. The fast-growing NAACP was testing out legal cases in hopes of desegregating the nation’s schools, including at the nearby University of North Carolina. World War II would accelerate the calls for equality as Black folks at home and abroad pushed for the integration of the armed forces and wartime factory jobs. 

Spaulding inched into the political arena indirectly in 1935, when he became the first president of the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs. The civic group registered Black voters and worked to get Black people elected to offices previously held by white politicians. In the context of North Carolina’s history, it was pioneering, dangerous work. But for the younger generation of Black activists, the committee and its political adherents were soon deemed too slow and conservative. As late as 1957, when a group of six Black students held a sit-in protesting segregation at a Durham ice cream parlor, many of Black Durham’s elders deemed them troublemakers. Just three years later, another sit-in in nearby Greensboro was credited with sparking a youth protest movement for civil rights that would rage throughout the 1960s.

Spaulding died in 1952. He would not live to see how drastically race relations in America were about to be transformed. But in another Southern city, a fellow Black businessman who had grown up in the aftermath of Reconstruction would get a chance to use his business acumen to aid—and sometimes to clash with—the greatest leaders of the civil rights movement.

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Birmingham, Alabama

Arthur G. Gaston never wanted to leave Alabama. Though he’d been exposed to life outside the vise of Jim Crow, while serving in France during World War I, he felt a permanent calling in his home state. Booker T. Washington, another famous Alabama resident, had a profound impact on Gaston’s trajectory. The famed president of the Tuskegee Institute visited Gaston’s school when he was a teenager. Washington’s autobiography, Up From Slavery, was the first book Gaston ever owned. He took to heart the educator’s famous words from an 1895 speech encouraging Black people to remain in the South and pursue success in business and agriculture: “Cast down your bucket where you are.”

Gaston grew up poor in rural Alabama. As a boy, he sold rides on his family swing to other neighborhood kids. After returning from World War I, he took a dangerous job at a mining company, where he made extra money selling his mother’s home-cooked lunches to his co-workers. Then he gave out loans to his co-workers. Next he launched a burial society, and he received a crucial boost when a local pastor encouraged his congregants to do business with Gaston. He realized that the steadiest money could come from providing life’s essentials rather than its frivolities. “Find a need and fill it,” he was known to say.

The success of his burial society allowed Gaston to pursue entrepreneurship full time. He opened a full-service funeral home called Smith & Gaston, and in the 1930s he relocated to downtown Birmingham, buying a mansion to convert into his new corporate headquarters. From then on, Gaston was a fixture both in Birmingham’s Black community and among its wealthy white high-rollers. 

Gaston’s headquarters was just steps from Fourth Avenue, the pulsing artery of Black business in the city. Like Durham and Richmond, the street had its share of doctors, lawyers, restaurants and entertainment venues. At the Little Savoy Café, owner Bob Williams donned a tuxedo to welcome celebrities like Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis when they passed through the city. The seven-story Masonic Temple, designed by Robert Robinson Taylor, an accomplished Black architect, featured a concert hall, offices for the NAACP and a community library. 

But part of what made Birmingham unique was its vast network of Black churches, many of which had ties to commerce. W.R. Pettiford, the founder of Alabama’s first Black bank, was also the minister at its first Black church, 16th Street Baptist. In the 1950s, when Gaston opened his own bank, he recruited churches as his first clients. In return for receiving their early backing, he offered them favorable loans for church construction projects.

It was a church conference that inspired Gaston to build what would become his most famous enterprise. In 1954, the National Baptist Convention was set to host a major gathering in Birmingham, but Black members of the group would have almost nowhere to stay, since most hotels were whites-only. Gaston purchased a lot next to his funeral home and converted it into the Gaston Motel, featuring 32 units and full air conditioning. The facility opened just six weeks after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Within a few years, the aftershocks of that ruling would shake Gaston’s neighborhood—and the entire city of Birmingham—to its core. 

In 1963, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference announced plans for an aggressive protest campaign in Birmingham, coordinated with the help of some 60 local churches. The civil rights movement was, in many ways, a business story. King had already leveraged the boycott in Montgomery to desegregate the city’s bus system. Now he wanted to use public protests in Birmingham to force white merchants to accept Black customers and workers. He knew before he arrived that the delicate dance between negotiation and agitation would not be possible without the aid of Arthur G. Gaston. 

Gaston, then in his 70s, was by far the most powerful Black man in the city, employing more than 500 people across his businesses and carrying more than $4 million in holdings at his bank. (King himself had made a $1,000 deposit.) But he was at ideological odds with the provocative young minister. King anticipated that the protests would goad the Birmingham police into mass arrests and acts of brutality that would shock the nation. Gaston feared this strategy would put Black Birmingham residents—particularly child protesters—in harm’s way. He preferred to negotiate directly with the white businessmen he considered friends, and to convince them, slowly over time, to desegregate. He was channeling another key element of Booker T. Washington’s economic philosophy, which viewed Black business success as a prerequisite to winning white support for social equality.

Elizabeth Gardner Hines, a great-niece of Gaston’s and a co-author of a biography called Black Titan, told me that Gaston’s conservative approach was understandable. “Given his life experience, he probably felt that if you went and stuck a stick in the eye of the white leaders of the community, your businesses would be doomed,” she said. “Your life might be doomed. I think he 100 percent believed that you had to have the support of the white power structure, and that you had to do things slowly and incrementally. That over time, negotiations would work.”

Gaston’s stance against disruptive protests, which he aired publicly to the press, drew the ire of King and his colleagues. The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the Birmingham minister who led the protest movement day in and day out, called Gaston a “super Uncle Tom.” King regularly ignored Gaston’s advice. Despite their differences, however, King and Gaston recognized that they were on the same side of the fight. While Gaston opposed some of King’s tactics, he gave the leader crucial resources. For example, the Gaston Motel became the headquarters of the Birmingham movement in the spring of 1963, with King and his team working out of the motel’s best suite. Gaston also offered them meeting space in another of his buildings. As public safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor began arresting protesters en masse, Gaston put up more than $150,000 to bail them out from jail. (He bailed King out at least once.) 

Gaston was not wrong to fear a violent white backlash. Both his motel and family home were bombed, as was the 16th Street Baptist Church, in a wicked act of terrorism that killed four little girls. But King’s gambit worked. The white businessmen of Birmingham did agree to some of King’s demands, including the desegregation of lunch counters. And national coverage of the protests pushed Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

Meanwhile, escalating violence forced Gaston to reassess his own politics, at least to a degree. In 1965, after the “Bloody Sunday” when protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Gaston and his wife Minnie offered their family farm as a stopover site for those determined to complete the march two weeks later. 

Ultimately, Gaston came to respect King and his tactics, which had long been contrary to his instincts. The Birmingham protests in the business district he had helped build shocked him, but they also provided moments of searing clarity about the stakes. For the rest of his life, he recalled being on the phone with a white lawyer during the heat of the protests, and peering out of his office window to see a young girl tossed into the air from the strength of a policeman’s firehose. “My people are out there fighting for their lives and my freedom,” he told the man. “I have to go help them.”

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After the end of the civil rights movement, in the late 1960s, the waves of Black migrants fleeing the South slowed. With millions now settled in cities across the North and West, the landscape of America had been transformed. But millions had stayed behind, too. By the 1970s, the country’s Black population was split, with roughly equal portions living inside and outside the South. 

Perhaps the achievements of those who stayed might be better remembered if so many of the communities they had built were not dismantled in the 1960s and ’70s. Interstate highways and urban renewal projects tore through Black neighborhoods, displacing thousands of residents, hollowing out commercial districts and fraying community ties. Meanwhile, many Black-owned businesses struggled to compete in a desegregated economy. In Birmingham, the Gaston Motel closed in the early 1980s due to declining occupancy. In Richmond, Maggie Walker’s St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, which later merged to become the Consolidated Bank and Trust, fell out of Black ownership in 2005. North Carolina Mutual entered a terminal decline decades ago and was finally liquidated in 2022. 

But there are other explanations for why people overlook the unlikely Black success stories of the Jim Crow South. In writing my book, I realized that people only came to appreciate the business success of Tulsa’s Greenwood District (which, as I learned, was not so unusual) because of its spectacularly violent destruction. That is the piece of the story that makes its way into documentaries, local newscasts and Hollywood productions. Black history not anchored by violence is easier for people to ignore or forget, but creation is a more challenging task than destruction. Walker, Spaulding and Gaston are evidence enough of that. Perhaps we should adjust the focus of our lens.