Corporations Compassion Culture. Keesa C. Schreane
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feel suspicious of White corporate systems. That mistrust is well-earned, rooted in devastating events. Freedman's Savings and Trust Company provides a perfect example.
After slavery ended, the US government determined that former slaves needed to participate fully in workforce activities. They wanted this to go beyond basic food and shelter to include access to financial services as well.
On March 3, 1865, Congress established Freedman's Savings and Trust Company with the purpose of helping Blacks understand and leverage the financial services system. The company also focused on hiring and training Blacks to work there. The rationale for the bank was clear: large numbers of Black men had been on the payroll of the Union Army, and paid labor needs a means to see returns and access capital.
Over the years, Freedman's grew. Deposit amounts were small, generally from $5 to $50, but added up to millions as deposits poured in from thousands of Blacks eager to establish financial services access. During its existence, Freedman's Savings and Trust Company had 37 branches and more than 70,000 depositors and $57 million in deposits (adjusted for inflation).3
Along with a beautiful headquarters in Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, dozens of branches began popping up around the country. Then the problems began. Some were unforeseen, such as the Panic of 1873, which caused yields on government securities to sharply decrease, thus reducing the return. The panic affected the entire economy and can't be laid at the feet of Freedman's.
But the same can't be said for the bank's poor management. Freedman's didn't operate with the same rigorous oversight and risk controls that exist in banking systems today. Questions about the prudence of sinking $200,000 into a building on Lafayette Street went unasked. Then, there was the revelation that a Freedman's board member, a White man named Henry Cooke, was siphoning funds from the bank to his own enterprise. The US Government saw the bank was headed downhill, with all this hard-earned money from former slaves riding shotgun.
Efforts to bring in Frederick Douglass to oversee the bank were too late. A post-reconstruction political environment and poor oversight took its toll. The bank remained operational until 1874. More than 61,000 depositors lost over $3 million. Little was recouped.4
The creation of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company in 1865 shows Blacks leveraging their wages to participate in the capital-building structure, as well as their trust in that financial corporate structure. Both their finances and their trust were exploited.
Caitlin Rosenthal is an assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley and the author of Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, which is a history of slaveholders' business practices. Using Freedman's as an example, she talks about the impact of distrust in the workplace between underrepresented people and mainstream cultures:
For Black capitalism to make a difference the capital actually has to be held by Black Americans. They have to be the owners and to be in these positions of power. If you can create a structure where the ownership of the capital and the control over the capital is in the community then I think that that's really powerful.5
Unions and Black Workers: Friend or Foe?
Given the importance of labor unions to employee-employer relationships—including expectations about productivity, protection, and pay—unions have long been a part of the Black employees' path to higher levels of inclusion, equality, and decent pay. But the path to equality has been a rocky one. To consider just one example, White employees of the Georgia Railroad went on strike in 1909, demanding that Black employees, who were paid less, be replaced with White workers who would, solely based on race, be paid more. When the strike eventually ended up in federal arbitration, the White union lost. Why? Because it was decided that paying Blacks equal to Whites would undermine the entire purpose of hiring Black workers in the first place. It's worth noting that the union in this case, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, was not only a White-only union but also acted consciously to the detriment of Black workers.
This is far from the only time that “diversity” in the workplace has been used to set one group of workers against another. Caitlin Rosenthal, assistant professor at University of California at Berkeley and author of Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, put it in stark terms:
Railroad managers and owners made [the case] for diversity [in hiring], but the business case they made was that having a diverse workforce would allow them to divide workers against each other and have more control over them. They said, “oh, we need to hire people with different racial backgrounds, but we're going to use that as a strategic advantage to prevent them from unionizing.” So there are people who've made business cases for diversity before, and they aren't always ones that we would feel good about now.6
Time and again, workers of color have discovered that diversity efforts are not always what they seem on the surface. History offers countless examples of this phenomenon. A 1907 report indicated that Black workers faced prejudice in trade unions and were permitted to work only where Blacks were highly concentrated so not to threaten White workers.7 The point is, the unions that helped protect the mental, physical, and financial well-being of workers didn't cover Blacks.
The Black Experience in Agriculture
The union-dominated industrial jobs were not the only ones available to Blacks. As a matter of fact, national farm statistics show that the opportunities for economic mobility among Blacks were actually to be found in agriculture, a trend that peaked in the 1920s. At the time, there were almost 1 million Black farmers. (Today that number is down to only 1.3% or about 45,000 of the 3.4 million total farmers, of which 95% are White.8) As the financial obstacles of the Great Depression took their toll on the farming industry, the New Deal legislation passed to assist White agricultural workers was not extended to Black ones. As James Gilbert Cassedy notes:
Protective labor legislation of the 1930s, such as the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, did not extend to agricultural workers, although 31.8 percent of the African American population in 1940 was employed in agriculture (40.4 percent in the South).9
In addition, working in agriculture had its own set of challenges. Blacks who were able to save enough money to buy land had to first find a White landowner willing to sell to them.10 Once they purchased or settled, White merchants sold them tools and goods needed to tend to the land and produce crops. Business fairness and ethics weren't legislated in this environment, so merchants were able to vary the prices and premiums they charged. Some agriculture unions weren't as prevalent or well organized as other unions but, even with the agriculture unions, Black farm workers who stood up against unfair commerce practices by White merchants often paid with their lives.
Moreover, from the New Deal through the early 1960s, federal subsidies allocated for farmers sometimes didn't make it to Black agricultural workers because of “local politics.” The inequities of not receiving the same subsidies as their White counterparts reduced their ability to keep their farming profitable and put them at an economic and professional disadvantage to their peers.11
In September 30, 1919, Black sharecropper families gathered near Elaine, Arkansas, to discuss membership in the Progressive Farmers and Household