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The Daughter of a Slave Who Did the Unthinkable: Build a Bank

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Back in Business is an occasional column that puts the present day in perspective by looking at business history and those who shaped it. Mr. Zweig’s Intelligent Investor column will return next week.

Citigroup Inc. recently announced that Jane Fraser would become its chief executive next year, making her the first woman CEO of a major Wall Street bank. If Ms. Fraser has finally cracked the glass ceiling, it was Maggie Lena Walker who first battered down the walls.

The daughter of a former slave, Walker became the first Black woman ever to head a U.S. bank when she founded the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Va., in 1903. Her success came from doing what great entrepreneurs do: Walker zeroed in on an underserved market and focused her prodigious energy on meeting its needs. But her story is all the more remarkable because it played out on a stage of such intense bigotry.

Her mother, Elizabeth Draper, was an illiterate teenager when Walker was born. Her father was a white Confederate soldier who, historians believe, raped Elizabeth. When Walker finished high school, her father, who still lived nearby, sent her a dress as a graduation gift. Her mother burned it.

As a girl, Walker helped her mother work as a washerwoman and soon joined her as a member of the Independent Order of St. Luke. This was a mutual-benefit society originally set up by a free woman in Baltimore that provided insurance, educational funding and other financial services to Black people after the Civil War.

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