May 10, 2019

Black Man’s Cow, White Man’s Milk: The Freedman’s Savings Bank

 “I often peeped into [The Freedman’s Savings Bank’s] spacious windows, and looked down the row of its gentlemanly and elegantly dressed colored clerks, with their pens behind their ears and button-hole bouquets in their coatfronts, and felt my very eyes enriched. It was a sight I had never expected to see. I was amazed with the facility with which they counted the money…The whole thing was beautiful…when I came to Washington and saw its magnificent brown stone front, its towering height, its perfect appointments and the fine display it made in the transaction of business, I felt like the Queen of Sheba when she saw the riches of Solomon, that “the half had not been told me.”[1]

—Frederick Douglass

It was too good to be true. Of all the best-laid plans of men in the risky 19th century, perhaps none except the Freedman’s Savings Bank continues to have resonance into the present.[2] The failure of the Bank in 1874 was an American tragedy. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the Bank executives’ calculated misconduct and speculation on railroad schemes, “Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done as much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the savings bank chartered by the nation for their especial aid.”[3] This essay traces the historiography of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, discusses and offers some thoughts on the potential ways forward for historians of the Bank and its relation to American capitalism.

The Freedman’s Savings Bank was founded by federal charter in March 1865 as a savings bank for Union soldiers. Like the Freedman’s Bureau, the Bank was sponsored by the federal government; unlike the Bureau, which was a subdivision of the US Army, the Bank was not a sector of the government and therefore not subject to the same level of federal oversight.[4] This meant that unscrupulous, indeed, corrupt, board members could speculate with blacks’ savings without anyone watching to see what they were up to. Between 1865 and its failure in 1874, the Bank “handled more than $75 million of deposits made by more than 75,000 depositors, an amount that would be approximately $1.5 billion today.”[5] The financial misbehavior of certain Bank board members caused it to go belly up in the wake of the Panic of 1873. None of the depositors ever saw their money again, and none of the bad apples on the Bank’s board ever were indicted.[6] As Frederick Douglass said of the Bank, “it was the black man’s cow, but the white man’s milk.”[7]

Despite its failures, the federally-chartered Freedman’s Savings Bank kept fair and accessible records. Historians have benefitted from the availability of such records since the early 1880s. African American historian George Washington Williams, considered one of the fathers of black history, deemed the failure of the Bank so significant as to merit inclusion in his The History of the Negro Race in America (1882). That book is widely considered to be first history of blacks in the United States. Williams laid the groundwork for how historians would represent the Bank. He included graphs, tables, statistics, and census data, and reproduced the bank’s original charter. The latter was a boon for historians and history students who would not otherwise have easy access to the full charter. Williams’ efforts to present what is now termed “Big Data” foreshadowed what other historians would do when they chose to study the Bank. Williams cited Frederick Douglass’s descriptions of how he came to see himself as a scapegoat while serving as the president of the Bank. Douglass’s account is significant for what it conveys, and provides the only firsthand account of an African American executive of the bank.[8]

Black writers and historians were the first to be concerned with the implications of the Freedman’s Savings Bank’s failure. W.E.B. Du Bois included discussion of the Bank in a 1901 article, “The Freedman’s Bureau,” for The Atlantic, as well as in his famous The Souls of Black Folk (1903). In the article Du Bois plainly stated that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line; he used the abandonment of the Freedman’s Bureau and the failure of the Bank as evidence to suggest that whites had hindered blacks’ post-emancipation advancements.[9] Du Bois largely drew upon George Washington Williams’s work of twenty years before. Du Bois was building toward one of the most brilliant articulations—Black Reconstruction (1935; to be discussed later)—in a career teeming with them.

Black writers and historians concerned themselves with the Freedman’s Savings Bank for two decades before a white Southerner would attempt to revise the whole affair. Born in Alabama the very year the Bank failed, Walter Lynwood Fleming would become one of the most notorious revisionist historians in a field—the so-called Dunning School of Reconstruction historiography—crowded with Lost Cause idolaters.[10] Fleming was still smarting from criticism directed at him by major national publications for his book Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (1905) when he presented a paper on the Bank at the American Historical Association later that year. Fleming would mull over the Bank for more than twenty years when his The Freedmen’s Savings Bank: A Chapter in the Economic History of the Negro Race (1927) was published on the eve of the Great Depression. Fleming argued that the federal government did more harm than good to blacks, and that the Bank was a misguided venture led by corrupt Northern businessmen. Fleming’s was the very first book-length treatment of the Bank.

Fleming’s reprehensible politics and Pro-Confederate leanings notwithstanding, he advanced knowledge of the Freedman’s Savings Bank through his close attention to the Bank’s literature. While it had long been noted that investors had been duped into believing that the Bank was an instrument of the federal government, the extent to which the Bank’s leaders went to propagate the misinformation had not been documented. Fleming was the first historian to pay much attention to the role of the Bank’s literature. Passbooks issued to investors falsely declared, “The Government of the United States has made this bank perfectly safe.”[11] One of the more misleading statements in the passbooks played on black Americans’ warm feelings for the late President Lincoln.

This is a benevolent institution. All profits go the depositors, or to educational purposes for the freedmen and their descendants…The whole institution is under the charter of Congress, and received the commendation and counsel of the President, Abraham Lincoln. One of the last official acts of his valued life was the signing of the bill which gave existence to this bank.[12]

 This is the language of the Bank’s literature at the time board member Henry Cooke began making risky loans: one to his own bank, First National Bank of Washington; one to his brother’s firm, Jay Cooke and Company; and one to the Union Pacific Railroad. Some of the Bank’s leaders were acting in bad faith, but after it became clear that the bank was failing the literature became even more manipulative: “You should use this Bank,” an article in the Bank’s newspaper declared, “because it is conducted entirely by your best friends, and it is hoped you will, ere long, help to conduct it yourselves; and being authorized by Congress, and approved by the President of the United States, it is the safest place you can find for your money.”[13] Fleming’s The Freedman’s Savings Bank included a very helpful appendix replete with primary documents, including examples of the literature of the Bank. Fleming’s attention to the passbooks would help to advance scholarship but his research was waylaid by his personal biases against blacks. Du Bois included Fleming on a list of historians he considered “anti-Negro”; those who “believe the Negro to be sub-human and congenitally unfitted for citizenship and the suffrage.”[14]

In contrast to Fleming, Du Bois’ historical training, community engagement, and life experience showed him what the Freedman’s Savings Bank had actually been. He’d spent decades prior to the writing of Black Reconstruction witnessing how black capitalism differed from white capitalism. In fact, Du Bois was the first scholar to conduct a comprehensive study of black business.[15] Although his writing about the Bank in Black Reconstruction was largely a review of secondary literature, Du Bois described the effects its failure continued to have in black communities throughout the U.S. Indeed, his descriptions of the Bank and its failure’s potential for even longer term effects foreshadowed the narrative arc that scholars later in the 20th century, and especially in the 21st century, point to in their work.

The Freedman’s Savings Bank did not receive much scholarly attention again until the reevaluation of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction during the 1960s and ‘70s. Interestingly, the Negro Universities Press republished Fleming’s work in 1970. This roughly coincided with Claude Oubre and Carl Osthaus’s scholarship on the Freedman’s Bureau and the Freedman’s Savings Bank. Oubre examined countless pages of government records and newspapers for Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership (1978). Oubre attempted to uncover why African Americans’ calls for radical redistribution of wealth and land reform were not realized in the wake of the Civil War. Ultimately, Oubre writes, “the tragedy of Reconstruction is the failure of the black masses to acquire land, since without the economic security provided by land ownership the freedmen were soon deprived of the political and civil rights which they had won.”[16] Oubre drew from newspapers all around the Deep South. Oubre writes about the Bank, but it is not the focus for his scholarship. Osthaus’s Freedmen, Philanthropy and Fraud: A History of the Freedman’s Savings Bank (1976) treats the Bank as “a case study in the perversion of a philanthropic crusade into a speculative venture.”[17] Under their leadership, “the Freedman’s Bank, the safe depository for the savings of tens of thousands of ex-slaves, became a gold mine for speculators, enterprising stock companies, and the District of Columbia’s Board of Public Works.”[18] Osthaus’s work was the first to give an in-depth examination of the Bank’s financial misconduct as fraud.

Just as the end of the Civil War enabled future historians like George Washington Williams to write and publish, so too did a desegregating America contribute to a more diverse academy. It is important to mention this development even if newly minted scholars may not have actively addressed the Freedman’s Savings Bank. For instance, Manning Marable, one of the most significant intellectuals to advance a theory of Black political economy, published How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1983), a revelatory text for its discussion of historical trends and patterns of superexploitation of black people in the U.S. Marable titled the book in memory of Guyanese historian Walter Rodney’s classic study How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). Rodney argued that Europe and Africa were and remain inextricably linked because of how the transatlantic slave trade brought untold economic advantages to Europe at the disastrous expense of African polities. Inspired by Rodney as well as the works of mid-20th-century writers like Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, and Douglas Glasgow, Manning wrote that “the most striking fact about American economic history and its politics is the brutal and systematic underdevelopment of Black people,” and described the continued profitability of racism.[19] Manning did not address the Freedman’s Savings Bank directly, but his theoretical framework for addressing unresolved socioeconomic tensions was greatly influential.

While conducting research for his Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988), Eric Foner found a single, dust-covered letter in the National Archives that spoke to how long depositors held onto the hope that their savings would be reimbursed. “Mr. President,” one depositor wrote in a 1921 letter, “I pray you to consider us old People…our best life spent in slavery…Just asking for what we worked for.” Foner writes, “Well into the twentieth century, pathetic appeals arrived in Washington from depositors seeking the balance of their funds.”[20] Foner, perhaps moved by the rise of gender and women studies in the 1980s, included the first, if brief, gendered analysis of the Bank. “Women,” Foner writes, “married as well as single, opened individual accounts at the Freedman’s Savings Bank.”[21] Foner writes that women knew that an account at the Bank would be seen “as a badge of freedom and the solid foundation upon which a new black community would flourish.” Foner’s Reconstruction became the most significant book about the period since Du Bois’.

Given that the Freedman’s Savings Bank had 37 offices in 17 states (including Washington, D.C.), its archives are ripe for microhistories. This is just what Howard University graduate student Barbara Josiah undertook in the early 1990s when she studied the Bank’s records to recreate the local black communities in Washington, D.C. and their mutual aid societies.[22] Josiah’s scholarship, although just one article’s length, showed how historians could mine the Bank’s records for biographical data that could be reverse engineered to demonstrate community values. Josiah’s research hints at the distinct possibility that the mutual aid societies with Bank accounts had existed prior to the Civil War. If this is the case, Josiah surmises, then it provides a glimpse into how blacks in Washington, D.C. organized themselves for the purposes of uplift.[23]

Scholarship about the Freedman’s Savings Bank has especially flourished in the past ten years or so. This resurgence in interest in the Bank during the last decade can perhaps be ascribed to the following events: 1) the housing mortgage crisis that had its nadir in 2008; 2) Barack Obama’s campaign, election and reelection to the presidency; and 3) the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. The most cogent arguments about the Freedman’s Savings Bank feature nuanced discussions of racism, credit discrimination, dispossession, and predatory banking practices. Rare is the historian who addresses all of these concerns. Fortunately, however, from 2008-2016 historians could look to a president who addressed these themes and thus may have incalculably aided the public discourse. Obama addressed the racial wealth gap during his 2008 campaign:

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.[24]

In just two sentences—in a campaign speech, no less—Obama addressed the enormous hindrances that have contributed to the racial wealth gap.

It may not be a coincidence that some of the best writing about the Freedman’s Savings Back and the 19th Century economy emerged during Obama’s presidency as the country slid into a market free-fall and debated solutions. Jonathan Levy’s Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (2012) is one of the best books for viewing the Freedman’s Savings Bank in context. Levy draws from a variety of sources to put the 1873 financial crisis into perspective. Levy describes contemporary ideas about racial stereotypes through an analysis of cartoons and racial pseudoscience, incorporates oral histories that were virtually unavailable to historians until at least the 1970s, and draws upon a 1936 biography of Bank board member Henry Cooke. Levy describes Cooke’s railroad ventures, where a good deal of the freed people’s savings went. The result is that Levy is able to give a better sense of what the moment the Bank failed was like. The government bailed out North Pacific Railroad, but not the freedmen. The careful attention to the railroad crisis demonstrates how the federal government subsidized that industry over the concerns of its black citizens.

For his The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (2014), Douglas Egerton mixes a review of secondary literature with his own archival research. In New York, the bank was frequented not just by freed people but by working-class and immigrant whites, “who, like black investors, regarded the Freedman’s Bank as the safest place to keep their meager earnings.”[25] Most historians skip over this fact. Egerton demonstrates that, at least in New York, the Bank appealed not only to blacks but also to white working-class and white immigrant communities. Egerton, perhaps taking a page from Josiah’s playbook, examines the Bank’s archives in a variety of locales including Charleston, South Carolina and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

But Egerton may have erred by stating that, once John Alvord, the aging but reform-minded and pointedly incorruptible president of the Bank’s board was forced to step down, “the board made a mistake of replacing him with a black abolitionist of limited financial experience.”[26] Egerton, it should be noted, is writing about Frederick Douglass. “Most likely,” Egerton continues, “there was nothing that Frederick Douglass could have done to save the institution, especially given the global nature of the economic crisis.”[27] It would have been more appropriate for Egerton to follow Douglass’s own words on the subject, then cross-reference his experience with how historians have analyzed the situation. It would have become clear, then, that Douglass was tricked into taking over the Bank’s presidency. When the cookie crumbled, some corrupt board members hoped, it would crumble all over Douglass. They would point to him as the scapegoat. In fact, once Douglass noticed the significant financial hurdles the Bank faced he invested $10,000 of his own money to try and keep the bank afloat. Douglass, like so many other investors, would never see a cent of it again.

Some scholars locate the racial wealth gap to the Freedman’s Savings Bank’s failure, arguing that a series of perverse continuities have occurred since then. Daniel C. Giedeman expressed the point in his 2011 article “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Freedman’s Savings Bank.” Giedeman’s review of political cartoons and newspaper articles dating from the failure of the Bank was an important contribution to the historiography. Giedeman’s review of early 20th century newspapers leads him to say that the Bank’s collapse was not completely forgotten. “Newspaper articles into the 1920s described the various attempts seeking reimbursement of the deposits,” Giedeman wrote. “By the late 1920s, however, the Freedman’s Bank seems to have disappeared almost entirely from newspaper articles.”[28] Giedeman adopts Oubre’s close analysis of historic newspapers but the former’s research is more conclusive; digitally scanning through thousands of newspapers would not have been possible prior to the 21st century. More to the point, Giedeman offers an informed hypothesis of the legacy of the Bank and contrasts it with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He concludes, “There is the potential for a sort of perverse continuity from the Freedman’s Bank to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their negative influence on the wealth-accumulation of African Americans.”[29]

Mehrsa Baradaran, a leading scholar of banking law, picked up on this thread in How the Other Half Banks (2015). Although Baradaran spent just a handful of pages addressing the Freedman’s Savings Bank in the book, she found it such a compelling story that she made it a central feature of her The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (2018), where she made excellent use of more than a century’s worth of scholarship. Baradaran reviewed the Bank’s propagandistic literature, incorporated the intellectual history of race inferiority that Levy described in 2012, wedded Osthaus and Oubre’s theses, and directly linked, as Obama did in his March 2008 speech, how all of this history informs the present.

Baradaran trains a critical eye on the very origins of the Freedman’s Savings Bank itself. If Oubre had argued that blacks in Reconstruction advocated for land reform, and Osthaus argued that the Bank was fraud disguised as philanthropy, Baradaran married these theses from the 1970s to chart a new path in the historiography of black banking. Baradaran writes, “Instead of land, freed slaves got rights that they could not use due to their economic and political status at the bottom rung of society. They also got a savings bank, which was another form of diversion that would be repeated in the next century.”[30]

Prior to Baradaran, scholars had not gotten to the crux of the matter—that the Bank was a paternalistic institution from the very start, that the history of blacks in freedom, reaping the harvest of a capitalist society, is the history of a dream deferred.

The whole point of banking is to collect money and to put it into productive use through lending, yet the Freedmen’s Bank was purposefully set up as a savings bank, a teaching institution, rooted in a paternalistic and condescending mission of instructing blacks in the ways of thrift and capitalism. But the bank left out the most important part of capitalism—the part where the capital is able to grow and multiply through credit. By not lending to depositors, the Freedmen’s Bank was counterfeit capitalism from its inception.[31]

Baradaran finds that the failure of the Bank portended a vicious cycle that continues to be played out in the present. She suggests that without recourse, the racial wealth gap will grow ever wider. The implications are stark.

Most noteworthy is Baradaran’s claim that since the inception of the Bank politicians have consistently baited black Americans with the promise of black banking and black capitalism, which then became “the very mechanism through which black money flowed out of the black community and into the mainstream white economy.”[32] Black banking and black capitalism, Baradaran writes, “have been consistent policy band-aid solutions, a decoy response to the fundamental challenge of overcoming America’s legacy of slavery.”[33] Baradaran does not fault black banks or businesses, of course, but rather the capitalist state.

Given that historians have exhaustively pored over the Freedman’s Savings Bank’s records, perhaps the most encouraging advancements in the historiography come from historians who are asking new questions of the archival material. In his The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture (2014), the late scholar Vincent Woodard pioneered an analysis of American slavery rooted in a theory of human consumption. Woodard specifies literal and metaphorical instances of whites’ cannibalism of black bodies from Europeans’ inception of the slave trade in Africa centuries ago until the end of slavery. Woodard presents evidence of how whites lived off of—that is, fed upon—blacks’ production, but also how this dependency had literal and symbolic connections to cannibalism. It’s a terribly striking suggestion, but one that is rooted in historical evidence. Consider Woodard, who writes “slavery is a highly stylized, institutionalized form of cannibalism,” and one begins to see the potential were his ideas applied to the Freedman’s Savings Bank and blacks’ wealth in relation to white America’s capital.[34] Woodard does not effectively address how black capital is actually used to finance whites’ exponential, capital growth but if one were to attempt to put this into practice, one might say that black deposits were consumed by profit-seeking whites.

When thinking with Woodard it becomes apparent that some historians had previously described white capitalism with similar symbolism. Marable’s 1983 How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America includes the following description: “Afro-Americans have been on the other side of one of the most remarkable and rapid accumulations of capital seen anywhere in human history, existing as a necessary yet circumscribed victim within the proverbial belly of the beast.”[35] Later in the same book Marable states that black capital is being digested “in the proverbial bowels of the capitalist leviathan.”[36] All of this reminds one that, indeed, America was not just built by black labor but that it might very well sustain itself on black wealth. Why else would the Freedman’s Savings Bank write up pamphlets for potential depositors in such manipulative, seductive language? Recall the Bank’s newspaper, which marketed its services to blacks with ads like this: “You should use this bank because it is conducted entirely by your best friends,” or the language in the Bank’s passbook which read “This is a benevolent institution.” The whole enterprise—the paternalist who will “protect” the ingénue, the naif being trained in the arts of saving; even the conspirators, like Henry Cooke, who “got off” without ever being indicted—speaks to a disturbing pattern of behavior worthy of sustained analysis. Because their behavior was motivated by their ideas about black investors, their interiority should be subject to historians’ scrutiny.  

Woodard writes of “the ritual sport of abuse,” when the enslaver would physically punish the enslaved, and “the spectacle of white male appetite and hunger.”[37] Is this not unrelated to the financial abuse of some of the poorest Americans immediately upon emancipation? We need to find out what causes this kind of financial predation. And, even more to the point, why are its manifestations in the present—these variations on a repetition—continually tolerated?

The downfall of the Freedman’s Savings Bank was of a piece with the other failures of Reconstruction. A better opportunity to build Black wealth never arose. Blacks owned .5 percent of the wealth in 1870; they own only 1% today, and that number is declining.[38] More than a century and a half since the end of the Civil War, historians can now outline broad patterns that have emerged. The patterns that relate to the Freedman’s Savings Bank, black banking, and black capitalism, are strikingly disconcerting. The Freedman’s Savings Bank is the story of who gets bailed out and who gets consumed.

Bibliography

Baradaran, Mehrsa. The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. Cambridge,    MA: Harvard University Press. 2017.

Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: From 1817-1882. London: Christian            Age Office. 1882.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. 1935.

Du Bois, “The Freedmen’s Bureau.” The Atlantic. March 1901.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Co. 1903.

Egerton, Douglas R. The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most   Progressive Era. New York: Bloomsbury Press. 2014.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. “The Steel Frame of Walter Lynwood Fleming.” The Dunning School:     Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction. Ed. By John David Smith and J.      Vincent Lowery. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. 2013.

Fleming, Walter. The Freedmen’s Savings Bank: A Chapter in the Economic History of the          Negro Race. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1927.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper.    1988.

Giedeman, Daniel C. “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Freedman’s Savings Bank.” Review            of Black Political Economy 38 (June, 2011): p. 205-226.

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            Washington DC’s Freedman’s Savings Bank, 1865-1874.” The Journal of African-           American History 89, no 1. (Winter 2004): 1-16.

Levy, Jonathan. Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America.       Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2012.

Marable, Manning. How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. Boston: South End Press.   1983.

Marlowe, Gertrude Woodruff, A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the       Quest for Black Empowerment. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 2003.

Nier III, Charles Lewis. “The Shadow of Credit: The Historical Origins of Racial Predatory         Lending and Its Impact upon African American Wealth Accumulation,” University of            Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change 11 (2007-2008): 131.

Oubre, Claude F. Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Osthaus, Carl R. Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud: A History of the Freedmen’s Savings         Bank.   Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1976.

Towns, Armond and Carolyn Hardin. “Banking Against (Black) Capitalism: On The Color of      Money. Los Angeles Review of Books, March 19, 2018.

Walker, Juliet E. K. The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2009.

Williams, George Washington. The History of the Negro Race in America, 1619-1880. New         York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1882.

Woodard, Vincent. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture. New York: New York University Press. 2013.

Notes

[1] Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: From 1817-1882, ed. John Lobb (London: Christian Age, 1882), p. 292.

[2] Historians differ on whether to use “Freedman’s” or “Freedmen’s.” I use “Freedman’s,” as that is the spelling used in its charter. For the purposes of variety, I alternate using “Freedman’s Savings Bank” and “the Bank” throughout this paper.

[3] W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” The Atlantic, March 1901.

[4] Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014), p. 131.

[5] Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), p. 25.

[6] Egerton, p. 133.

[7] Douglass, p. 290.

[8] George Washington Williams, The History of the Negro Race in America, 1619-1880 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1882), p. 167.

[9] Du Bois, “The Freedman’s Bureau.”

[10] The Nashville Agrarians dedicated I’ll Take My Stand (1930) to Fleming; Fleming could also claim to be one of the very few historians to have a liberty ship named in his honor.

[11] Walter Lynwood Fleming, The Freedmen’s Savings Bank: A Chapter in the Economic History of the Negro Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927), p 45.

[12] Ibid, 44.

[13] Ibid, 145.

[14] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, p. 731.

[15] Baradaran, p. 50

[16] Claude F. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), p. 197.

[17] Carl R. Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud: A History of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 1.

[18] Osthaus, p. 153.

[19] Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983), p. 75.

[20] Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper Perennial, 1988), Kindle location 9974 of 18052.

[21] Ibid., Kindle location 2054 of 18052.

[22] Josiah notes that she began researching in the early 1990s but her article was not published until 2004. See Barabara P. Josiah, “Providing for the Future: The World of the African American Depositors of Washington DC’s Freedman’s Savings Bank, 1865-1874,” The Journal of African-American History 89, no 1 (Winter 2004), p. 1-16.

[23] Ibid., p. 15-16.

 

[24] Senator Barack Obama, Remarks at the Constitution Center: A More Perfect Union (March 18, 2008), http://go.philly.com/obamarace.

 

[25] Egerton, p. 131.

[26] Egerton, p. 135.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Daniel C. Giedeman, “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Freedman’s Savings Bank,” Review of Black Political Economy 38 (June, 2011), p. 219.

[29] Ibid., p. 225

[30] Baradaran, p. 22

[31] Ibid., p. 27

[32] Baradaran, p. 5.

[33] Ibid., p. 4.

[34] Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture (New York: New York University, 2014) p. 97.

[35] Marable, p. 1-2.

[36] Ibid., p. 22.

[37] Woodard, p. 102.

[38] Baradaran, p. 9.