Recent Reviews of Howard University Press Titles

FROM:   "Between the Bookends,” by Ann Lloyd Merriman, Editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 2, 2003, page J5.

             The name of Maggie Lena Walker is well-known in Richmond, where a high school bears her name and the Consolidated Bank she founded, continues to operate, even though under some difficulties today. The life of this outstanding Richmonder is recounted in Howard University Press’ edition of A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment, by the late Gertrude Woodruff Marlowe (hardback $36.95, paperback $24.95).  [Dr.] Marlowe documented as much as possible Mrs. Walker’s background: Her grandparents came from Powhatan County, and Mrs. Walker’s mother worked for the notorious Union spy Elizabeth van Lew. While young, Mrs. Walker Joined the Independent Order of the Sons and Daughters of St. Luke and through the years rose steadily in its ranks until she became head of the Order. The book explores Mrs. Walker’s success in chartering the first bank to be started by a black woman in this country, her personal life—including the mysterious death of her husband at the hands of their son, the context of her life in Richmond’s business, philanthropic, and social activities, and her proud and extensive legacy. A section of photographs, copious notes, and an index round out a book deserving of its ranking as a primary source of information about a woman whose achievements are all more remarkable for the times in which she made them.

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FROM:   “The Right Worthy Maggie Walker”, Soul of Virginia Magazine, Fall 2003, page 13.

Born of humble beginnings in post-Civil War Richmond, Virginia, Maggie Lena Walker rose to prominence at the turn of the 2Oth century as a pioneering insurance executive, financier and civic icon. Howard University Press' recent publication, A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment, presents the most thoroughly researched and documented biography of Walker’s remarkable life and times.  Authored by the late Gertrude W. Marlowe, a Harvard-trained social anthropologist and Howard University professor, A Right Worthy Grand Mission places Walker solidly among the ranks of African America's most industrious and ambitious early leaders. Though renowned as one of the most highly paid and wealthiest black women of her time, Walker demonstrated an overarching commitment to hard work, frugality, prayer and race vindication. Revered to this day by black and white Virginians, she was the consummate "race woman," who, as fellow activist and clubwoman Nannie Helen Burroughs eulogized, "gave her life as a ransom for many."

Yet, Marlowe writes, “Neither the term cultural heroine nor charismatic leader, although accurate descriptions and suggestive of certain aspects of Walker's persona, seems adequate to comprehend her popularity.”  Her legacy is capably explored in this exhaustive study, which uses the detailed approaches of ethnographic method and its retrospective twin, social history, to unravel the layers of intrigue surrounding this great woman's public and personal affairs.

A Right Worthy Grand Mission begins at the crux of two centuries, as the nation struggled to repair the ruptures torn by slavery and rush headlong into the Industrial Age. It details the shadowy circumstances of Walker's origins and early life, noting the solidity that came to young Maggie's life when, at age 14, she joined the Grand United Order of St. Luke, a floundering African American fraternal and cooperative insurance society plagued by mismanagement. The Order had been established to assure proper health care and burial arrangements for its newly freed members and to encourage self-help and racial solidarity. It later became the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL), and Walker rose rapidly through its ranks, assuming every office until 1890, when she took over the reins as Right Worthy Grand Secretary-Treasurer.

The renaissance of "the St. Lukes," newspaper columnists of the era proclaimed, began that day. Prior to 1890, the IOSL had 3,400 members, no reserve funds, no property and a small staff. By the mid-1920s, Walker, a woman of boundless energy and spellbinding oratorical skills, had virtually single-handedly brought the organization to solvency. By 1924, at the peak of her leadership, IOSL membership exceeded 70,000 in 1,500 local chapters. It boasted a staff of 50 working in its Richmond headquarters, assets of nearly a half million and payment of more than $1 million in death claims.

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FROM:   “Book Nook: A Woman of Power,” by Phil Hall, Book Editor for the New York Resident, January 5, 2004, page 46.

In 1903, Maggie Lena Walker made history as the first woman to become a bank president. The institution was the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank of Richmond, VA.  While this achievement carries a considerable historic significance because few women held corporate power a century ago, what makes this even more astonishing was that Walker was an African American and her institution was in the capital of the former Confederacy.

Gertrude Woodruff Marlowe's A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment (Howard University Press, $24.95 [paper], 286 pages) is the inspiring biography of the amazing life of Walker, who had a profound effect on the social and economic empowerment of African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Through her tireless efforts, disenfranchised African Americans were given long-overdue access to stable and secure financial services and were encouraged to pursue educational and entrepreneurial activities. Her successful promotion of equal rights based on both race and gender were almost revolutionary for its time, and the success of her goals can still be felt today. (Her bank still survives in Richmond as the Consolidated Bank and Trust.)

A Right Worthy Grand Mission brilliantly recalls the tumultuous and often harrowing worlds surrounding Walker, when the disenfranchised African American community found its post-Civil War freedoms slowly revoked.

Economic prosperity was an elusive goal, and the failure of the congressionally chartered Freedman's Bank (designed for black customers but which focused its major lending almost exclusively on corrupt white business men) was a cruel blow that left many people afraid to trust any institution with their funds.

Despite her successful professional triumphs, Walker's personal life was marred with tragedies, including a miscarriage early in her marriage, ill health resulting from nerve damage in her knees from a fall and diabetes, and a scandal in 1915 when her eldest son fatally shot her husband outside of their home, mistaking him for a prowler. Yet by the time of her death in 1934, Walker was praised not only by African Americans but even by the white power elite in Virginia for her spirit and determination.

In 1978, her home in Richmond was named a national landmark by the National Park Service. With A Right Worthy Grand Mission, her life story is clearly shown to be a national treasure.

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FROM:   “Virginia Reviews”, by Gregg D. Kimball, Director, Publications and Educational Services, Virginia Libraries, January –March 2004, pages 35-36.

A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 2003. xlviii + 286 pp. (softcover).

In the preface to this work, author Gertrude Woodruff Marlowe wonders at the relative obscurity of Maggie Lena Mitchell Walker in the current national consciousness. Walker ran an African American fraternal order—the Independent Order of St. Luke—with more than 100,000 members in twenty-three states, an organization that had extensive insurance, banking, and other financial interests. She served on the board of the NAACP, the National Association of Colored Women, and the National Negro Business League, among other organizations. Marlowe points out that the designation of Walker's home as a National Park Service historic site has signaled renewed interest in her story. Perhaps this thorough biography will enjoy a wide circulation and further enhance Walker's deserved reputation as an important national leader. Howard University Press is to be commended for seeing this book project to completion after the author's untimely death.

The book at hand is more than a biography. Marlowe creatively fits Walker's life within the larger patterns of American and African American history, from the Reconstruction-era South through the rise of Jim Crow segregation. Walker rose from humble beginnings as the daughter of a domestic servant in the household of the ardent Unionist and Yankee spy Elizabeth Van Lew. Walker learned the value of hard work early through helping her widowed mother with laundry chores. But she also grasped the benefits of education, attending the newly created freedmen's schools and eventually graduating from Richmond's Colored Normal School in 1883. Walker participated fully in the rich black culture of the late nineteenth century, including the many literary societies and fraternal orders that blossomed in postwar Richmond. She ultimately became Grand Worthy Secretary of the Independent Order of St. Luke in 1899 and later founded its bank, beginning her long and distinguished career as a fraternal and business leader.           

Marlowe also succeeds in contextualizing Walker's thought within the growth of various black ideologies that argued about how best to advance "the race." Her beliefs emphasized an economic nationalism of self-help, including patronizing black businesses such as the St. Luke's Emporium, and a strong emphasis on the importance of women as business and social leaders in the black community. Walker opposed the imposition of Jim Crown segregation and ran on the so-called "lily-black" Republican ticket in 1921 for Virginia supervisor of public instruction. This foray into politics was prompted by the purging of blacks from influence in the Republican Party.

Finally, it is to the author's credit that she covers Walker's personal life, even though Walker had her share of tragedy and even scandal. The shooting death of her husband by her son, eventually ruled an accident after protracted legal proceedings, is fairly and dispassionately handled in the book. A Right Worthy Grand Mission is a welcome addition to a fine crop of recent biographies of important African Americans from Virginia, including Henry Box Brown and John Mitchell, Jr. —a trend that ought to continue.

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