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      Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke

      Elsa Barkley Brown explores the role of Maggie Lena Walker and other women in the development and expansion of the Independent Order of Saint Luke, which was failing when Walker became grand secretary in 1899. The Independent Order of Saint Luke began as a women’s sickness and death mutual-benefit association in Maryland in 1867. The organization accepted men starting in the 1880s, when it expanded to New York and Virginia (Barkley Brown 1989, 616). When Walker took over, a majority of the board of directors were also women. They became politically active in their communities and served as role models for other women and girls. Walker “insisted that organization and expansion of women’s roles economically and politically were essential ingredients without which the community, the race, and even black men could not achieve their full potential” (621). Women members argued that their community could not be developed fully by men alone, and that Black women had to be integral to the process (629). Walker also institutionalized a notion of family that encompassed everyone who worked within the organization (619), which helped to cement community ties.

      Walker built up the Richmond branch of the Order of Saint Luke, which later became the organization’s headquarters, adding a department store and a bank (the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank) in 1903; the purpose of the bank was to provide loans to the community. The Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank also owned six hundred homes by 1920. By 1929 it had bought up all the other Black-owned banks in Richmond and became the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, the board of which was chaired by Walker. “By 1924, the Independent Order of Saint Luke had 50,000 members, 1500 local chapters, a staff of 50 working in its Richmond headquarters and assets of almost $400,000” (Bois 1998).

      In terms of Walker’s leadership and perspective on Black women and collective action, Barkley Brown writes:

      Undergirding all of their work was a belief in the possibilities inherent in the collective struggle of black women in particular and of the black community in general. Walker argued that the only way in which black women would be able “to avoid the traps and snares of life” would be to “band themselves together, organize, . . . put their mites together, put their hands and their brains together and make work and business for themselves.” The idea of collective economic development was not a new idea for these women, many of whom were instrumental in establishing the Woman’s Union, a female insurance company founded in 1898. . . . The institutionalization of this notion of family cemented the community. (618–19)

      Barkley Brown makes several important points about how collective economic activity came naturally to the Black women leaders of Saint Luke’s, because they had been involved in other organizing and economic development activity. The women also recognized that men needed to work together with them. This created a strong institution that expanded economically, socially, and politically.

      Major Contributions of Mutual-Aid Societies

      In addition to providing assistance to members, mutual-aid and beneficial societies also taught members many skills, both individually and collectively. Du Bois (1907) lists four major contributions: they encouraged economic cooperation, inspired self- and group confidence, consolidated small amounts of capital, and taught business methods. These important skills were transferable to other spheres of life, and set the stage for future collective economic activities. There are many examples throughout this volume of African American women and men who were first involved in mutual aid and then became involved in more formal cooperative businesses. Halena Wilson, the president of the Ladies’ Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a co-op developer, started out as the leader of a mutual-aid society, for example (see chapters 4 and 7). Charles Prejean, the former executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, another example, notes that many of the early activists in Black southern cooperative economic efforts in the 1950s and ’60s had first been members of community-level benevolent organizations. This experience “brought to [cooperative economic efforts] some skills that were very useful to the organization” (Prejean 1992, 15). Some mutual-aid organizations transitioned into formal businesses, particularly mutual insurance companies, which were the earliest of the formal cooperatives.