The Freedmen's Savings Bank

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 175265076X

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-129631

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Fleming, Walter Lynwood http://d-nb.info/gnd/120660560X

Title:: The Freedmen's Savings Bank

Place of publication:: Chapel Hill

Publisher:: Univ. of North Carolina Press

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: x, 170 S.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

160 THE FREEDMEN’S SAVINGS BANK Negroes? What could these four or five millions of blacks just emancipated from slavery think about that? If you will think about that, think about the fact that Congress itself had supported this movement, and that Congress had given these men authority to come in and to gather up this money and had given them the power to establish these banks, here and there, one in Richmond, and I was a depositor in that bank, and so was my father and my mother, and so were all of us there, because we thought and believed that this great big Government was behind it and that we were simply putting our funds into the hands of the Government. That is all. The Negro forty- five years ago did not have very much discretion and could not read signs. He was simply being led by the white men who had the authority and whom they believed the Government had sent, and so we turned loose every dollar we could rake and scrape and save in the hope of making something of ourselves, hoping to start out along the line of progress. . . . I can remember that I used to walk up the bank and put in the few pennies that I could rake and scrape to- gether. We thought that it was the Government. We did not know anything but that Congress had created it and that the United States had given the power to these people to start it. The preachers were speaking about it, and they were collecting from all the societies, churches and Sunday schools. Every cent that they could rake and scrape was shoved into this institution with the idea that in the future we were going to live more like other men, That was the condition forty-five years ago. It ran on for nine years. The Negro had no part in it, and he could not have managed it if he had. He did not have the ability or training or anything else that made it possible for him to do anything. . . . That little failure in 1874 did more to rob the Negro of hope and to rob him of faith in banks than any other occurrence that has happened since he landed at James- town. . ... Richmond was the center of all the influx of people just turned loose, and meetings were held in all the churches, and societies were being formed, and this money was col-

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