I would very much like to thank the Gabelli Center for Global Security analysis and our wonderful partners, the museum of American Finance and the cfa society of new york for cosponsoring todays conversation. One of the goals is to shine the light on the importance that history plays in shaping the future. In shennette garrettscotts latest book, banking on freedom, black women in u. S. Finance before the new deal, she explores a period of financial innovation and its Transformative Impact on u. S. Capitalism. Todays session will take place in three parts. First, my colleague and friend president and ceo of the American Museum of finance and we will introduce doctor shennette garrettscott. Then she will discuss her book banking on freedom following this discussion we will facilitate audience questions and we ask you type the questions in the q and a section near the bottom of the screen. Im also excited to share that as a participant of todays webinar will be entered into a raffle to win a free copy of the book banking on freedom. Winners will be notified by the end of the week and finally before i turn it over to do a formal introduction i do want to remind everyone that both the Gabelli School and the museum mm rely on your Financial Support to continue the mission so i encourage you to take some time to think about a donation to both of our outstanding organizations. Now id like to turn it over to david. Thank you. And its great to be back with you the friends that we have it of course the cfa. And our speaker today is a native texan who received her phd at the university of texas and is currently a professor at the university of mississippi. In her research and writing she brings to the floor the issues of race, gender and capitalism. The book has received praise including awards from the organization of american historians, the association of black women historians, the Southern Historical associations southern economic history and was also on the short list for the prize for the best book in Business History in 2020. Now a friend of the museum and former speaker in this series are quote on quote innovative and pathbreaking as well as beautifully written and deeply researched. Given the social climate in the country today, the book is timely to understanding the deepseated issues of inclusion and participation within the Free Enterprise capitalist system. To tell us about banking on freedom and the story who says about herself she wasnt born with a silver spoon in her mouth but rather a Laundry Basket on her head is gabelli. Welcome. Thank you so much, david, for that wonderful introduction and for inviting me and everyone who made this possible. I am going to share my screen and the slide and we will go ahead and get started talking. I appreciate people taking time out of their busy schedules to spend it learning about black womens contribution to u. S. Finance. So, today i will talk for about 35 minutes and i will talk about the world of black finance before the 1929 stock market crash. I focus on one company that is the finance corporation and i will use it to explore how black women use Financial Institutions like the finance corporation that they led and controlled to challenge the constraints of jim crow and economic exploitation. They used Companies Like this to carve out possibilities for themselves in the u. S. Economy and society. They understood the notions and ideas about wealth and value and risk were shaped by gender and race and your place in the economic ladder. But they were not simply defined by these factors and these processes. They took an active role in shaping the moving of wealth and risk and opportunity, and while i certainly acknowledge the limitations they face because of their race and gender and class i also want to demonstrate how black women define their values in ways that often raise counter to the kind of messages they receive about their worth as citizens and economic actors not just in black communities but also the larger u. S. Economy. So we should have a good amount of time left for questions and answers. I think the best way to understand is through two women who were vitally important to the venture thats Charity Jones and Robinson Jones. In the next slide, you will see two images. I only have about three pictures total of those two women, but the women in the images imagest captures their spirit. I will start by imagining their early lives in new york to understand the kind of challenges that black women face and then i will describe the independent order on how the Harlem Branch of the order formed the finance corporation and then i will talk about the successes and the challenges faced, especially the finance corporations board which was comprised totally of women. So lets get started. Charity. Charity hesitated a moment before she stepped onto the dusty dirt street. What am i doing, she thought to herself suspended in the street car door before her old life that lay behind her and this awful new place, the smell, the noise, the people, so many moving, pressing, sweating, buzzing like flies rising from the piles of horsemen newer in the streets. This was 1885 and charity paused for a while for mostly empty streets of the car beckoning. She glanced back and what did she return to, eight dead babies in years all of them taken from her. There was no one there back in virginia. So she drew in her breath and planted her feet. She dared not look back at the tiny handprint. Eight babies calling her back home. Lulu hesitated a moment before she stepped onto the wooden floor slick by hundreds of dancers, black men and with fingers like her selves. The stage like homes of people murmured and pressed tightly together in the hard wooden theater seats. It sounded like a rush of wind. Now this was harlem, 1916 and lulu paused for a moment to suspended between the noisy backstage goingson and expectant audience just to be on the lip of the curtain. She eyed the quiet space at the center of the stage, a pocket she could pour her voice into. So, lulu drew in her breath and planted her feet on the floor. As she stepped into the spotlight, darkness swallowed up the side of the stage where she stood only a moment ago. She dared not look back at the emptiness of that Place Holding on to silence. So, Charity Jones and Lulu Robinson jones was her daughterinlaw had a very different experiences as Migrant Women who moved to new york city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they did share important things in common. Of course the only surviving child, a son. But like hundreds of thousands of other black women, they also left the south to pursue better lives in the north, the chance to earn more money, to escape this humiliating social etiquette and the Sexual Violence of jim crow to find excitement in the big cities of the north. These women also shared a devotion to the independent order of st. Lukes. This was a secret society that was founded in the 1850s by a free black woman. In 1899, the independent order came under the leadership of the ambitious Maggie Walker and from its headquarters in richmond, it would become one of the most successful black controlled and one of the very few largely black women controlled Financial Institutions in the country. At its peak in the mid1920s, the order ram an ran a bank and insurance company, operated a newspaper, it boasted 100,000 members in more than 20 states. It and employed nearly 200 people and the overwhelming majority of young women and it possessed assets that were equivalent to about 31 million in modernday dollars. One important venture that brought the independent order of st. Lukes both renowned and scandal involved Charity Jones and Lulu Robinson jones, and that was the st. Lukes finance corporation headquartered in harlem and organized in the late 19 teens by the new York District of the independent order of st. Lukes. The st. Lukes finance corporation reflects the opportunities that have opened for women in u. S. Finance by the 1920s, so there was a complex tapestry made up of thousands of black controlled Financial Institutions. These included formal banks and Insurance Companies as well as thrift savings clubs, industrial loan associations, Credit Unions and even finance corporations. And this complex tapestry controlled millions of africanamerican dollars and expanded the boundaries of their dreams. But during the great migration around world war i, however, the increasingly urban and northern black population taxed the capacity of these Financial Institutions that have the tapestry as worn in places and the boundaries. So the strategies the st. Lukes Financial Corporation chose to promote reflected some of these anxieties about black womens bodies in these new urban spaces and there were these conflicting tensions that its al saw blacks both the victim but also the source of social disorder both in need of financial protection but also new economic opportunities. So, working womens demands struck these Financial Institutions like the order of st. Lukes. They desired better Career Options and housing choices. They rejected these efforts to their behavior and the way they spend their leisure time. So these would become called new negro women were attracted to the promises of investment as a vehicle for civic inclusion, for Political Rights and as a way to destroy and dismantle jim crow. They also grew tired of these pitches that implied men were the proper producer and consumer of these investment products, these markers of citizenship. The Financial Institutions that were led and controlled experimented with innovative ways to raise capital and they also struggled with and the experience and intractable problems of racial and sexual discrimination, so my book banging on freedobanking on frea number of these but here im going to focus on the rise and fall of the st. Lukes finance corporation. So, it is 1916 and the struggling new York District of st. Lukes which was headquartered in harlem has elected a new president. His name is dennis rice. The harlem st. Lukes had 3. 45 in its coffers but was more than 400 in debt. Now it may have been the former hand at the wheel and Ambitious Group of women controlled the lever so in 1981, 21 members, most of them women, inc. The stn and they set their sights on investments in real estate. So six of the Seven Members of the finance corporations board and Lulu Robinson jones who was widowed by 190 1909 shared the Advisory Committee so the revived harlem st. Lukes turned to Charity Jones to help them recruit new members and Charity Jones solidified her status and was known as the mother of st. Lukes in new york. So through her effort the membership in the new York District sword in the midst of the great migration. Now it wasnt the womens charm alone that fueled the resurgence in the harlem st. Lukes numbers. They are laser focused on addressing the need of black women and lift the spark that revived the order so like i said before, tested and expanded the boundaries of these organizations, they were this model of modern black womanhood and we have scholars that talk about the negro woman and they stress their cultural and political importance, but economic concerns are high among their priorities. These women and their families, they desperately needed jobs and housing. And Robinson Jones understood this dilemma intimately i suspect. In the mid1 mid to 19 teens liy young black women, she likely confronted limited Employment Opportunities as well as the housing traditions of the skyrocketing rent over policing and overcrowding and segregated sections of the city. So, Robinson Jones and the other women of the Advisory Board were able to borrow 3,000 from walker in the Saint Luke Bank in richmond but they were cautious of the finance committee were likely either unwilling to invest more in this real estate or they were just unable to do so because investment in the real estate even then required substantial capital and those capital demands we have to remember were compounded by the racial tariff that made the cost of credit and consideration higher than for whites. So Robinson Jones envisioned this new and returning members as potential investors. An opera singer she also understood the business of leisure in harlem and she arranged the Fundraising Affairs that combined entertainment and enterprise. So for example, she organized this fundraising reception at the manhattan casino and changed a very famous orchestra provided the music. So, in just a few months, the harlem st. Lukes raised enough money to secure a mortgage on a building. It purchased a former convent on west 130th street. In 1921, just a few years later, it bought a second property, a 24 room Apartment Building on west 129th street, and it was called the casanova. In 1922, it remodeled its first acquisition, the former convent on 130th and it transformed it into the st. Lukes hall. It became the new york st. Lukes district headquarters and the st. Lukes spend the equivalent of more than a million dollars, modern dollars, to remodel the st. Lukes hall on 130th. And this hall accommodated everything, all these events in the black community from pageants to Church Groups to International Delegations to union meetings. And in 1924, the order further added to its holdings by purchasing a third property, a combination Apartment Building, restaurant and retail store on west 139th street which wasnt too far. So, st. Lukes three properties stood as these brick, granite and steel monuments to black economic progress located in the heart of harlems black communities and growing black communities, st. Lukes hall became an important center for business, Community Activities and entertainment. The pastor of first imanuel thel Church Called out st. Lukes hall as the place where bootlegging, bold prostitution and cabarets rely its saintly name. Frederick, the pastor of the Salem Episcopal Church and father of the harlem renaissance poet Chelsea Collins called the hall nothing less than one of the hellholes of god. So it was very likely that in the restaurant and the stores and the Office Spaces in st. Lukes hall and its apartments held parties to help make ends meet and they ran numbers games which was a highly profitable lottery gambling game and also very popular. Success in the business of leisure and living it seemed required a foot in both the formal and extralegal economies in harlem. So lets recount. Okay, 1916 the harlem st. Lukes and 1918 they formed the st. Lukes finance corporation and within a few years that Corporation Makes some ambitions and lucrative Real Estate Investments so that by 1929 and a little more than a decade, the new york st. Lukes went from nearly 400 in debt to having more than 5 million and that is a very conservative modernday dollar having 5 million in properties. So as the country led towards the economic decline by the end of the decade, for all of the Corporation Stock left undercapitalized despite the fact that it was generating more than 10,000 in annual profits and that accounts for and equals about 150,000 in modernday dollars they raised from renting the spaces in the hall and apartments in the building and they used the revenues to provide jobs or admittedly a topheavy workforce of nearly two dozen employees but also to fund its public commitment such as providing charitable assistance to nearly 500 harlem families. Let me stretch here for just a moment of these concerns face affordable quality housing for restaurants, retail spaces that offer their prices and a variety of goods and services, good paying stable jobs, respectable and not so respectable amusement and leisure activities these were important priorities for black women in particular and black communities in general. And these were the central social economic and i would add political concerns that animated those women who were leading the st. Lukes finance corporation. So, the district ended up raising the equivalent of about 1. 2 million in modernday dollars from a bond offering. The incredible amount of money they were able to raise highlights the democratization of investing among black communities. Let me say that another way. Demonstrating the ways that investing was popular and accessible for most africanamericans and its also revealed a commitment to the working and middle classes, their commitment to selfhelp and banking on freedom i highlight black peoples participation in an investment and getrichquick schemes that made the 20 as roar. 1. 2 million, i mean, thousand dollar loans and these Swanky Affairs cannot explain at least on their own the dramatic rise in the saint Harlem Harlem st. Lukes. There is the creative financing and in the interest of time im not going to go into detail here but i do delve into those creative financial schemes that the ladies of the finance corporations experimented with to raise these an impressive psalmimpressive psalmsin such a. So, the countrys economic downturn couples with vast past investigations into the seminal organizations like Marcus Garvey and the universal Negro Improvement Association finances really left the creative financial scheme of all kinds of black fraternal and other kinds of organizations which included of course the independent order of st. Lukes vulnerable to state scrutiny and that is exactly what happened. 1928 the new York State Attorney general began an investigation into the order and after just two hearings, the court determined that the order was insolvent and it appointed a receiver and ordered the district to sell its real estate holdings. So just as i imagined at the beginning of my talk how Charity Jones, and actual sisters of Charity Jones and Lulu Robinson jones, the only picture i have of her, might have felt moving to and through new york city i can only ponder how they must have felt when their beloved order lost its crown jewels. Charity jones must have felt particularly bleary left at the losses because she lost her home. She lived in one of those modelemodeldepartments in the ss hall, the First Property that they purchased. From her well, i know that she died in 1929 and still resided at 127 west 130th street. But it was no longer the glorious st. Lukes hall. That had to be bittersweet. And Lulu Robinson jones told the census taker in 1930 that she wasnt working she was unemployed. It isnt clear how active she stayed in st. Lukes, but its likely that she never again held such a powerful position in a multimillion dollar concern. So what . I hope as i close, by illuminating this fascinating story about the rise and fall of the st. Lukes bank on freedom at which this story about the st. Lukes finance corporation is a part, i try to connect these major developments in u. S. History, so talking about reconstruction, the gilded age, the great migration, world war i, the new negro era. And im trying to uncover the important and the active role black women played in the development of modern american capitalism and while i acknowledge the contribution black women made to the modern capitalism, i cannot ignore the aspects of capitalism with the destructive ways that the political economy severely limited black womens opportunities. So, looking at the st. Lukes corporation as a kind of case study, we see investment as a form of community and Institution Building but also of protest, the resistance that stand alongside other kinds of demand for Economic Justice like the strike or the boycott. So when black women as creditors and debtors and consumers and stock and it turns policyholders, they really try to transform the racial capitalism through the Woman Centered kind of articulation of black economic selfdetermination. But i have to mention where i got the title. I dont have the last slide up. I hope you are familiar with the numbers game that was so popular from the late 19th century to the late 1970s and a pretty basic version of this plan of members involved tracing a bet on this three number combination. So if your number hit, you could turn a tiny investment of a Little Pocket change into a couple hundred dollars, so the industry kind of rises out of this popular numbers game. So you have lucky objects and charms and spiritualists that can help you predict your lucky numbers and you also have these things called dream books. This is how it works. Say you have a dream about a dog. You can lock in the book and find a three number combination attached. You could find three numbers associated and you would turn these numbers to win. So one from the 20s and 30s offered this explanation under people who dreamed about colored people. And the dream book said, quote, this is an excellent dream for all. It promises riches and extraordinary good health to a speedy relief and farmers to the brokenhearted courage. So i brought up the title from this description because i imagine that the women of the st. Lukes corporation were dreaming of the African Community and that they felt it was an excellent dream for all. Thank you all so much for your attention and time and thank you for inviting me. It is our pleasure. Thank you so much. I cant let you escape without talking about the woman that adorns the cover of your book. Can you tell the audience because its amazing her circumstances. She was born and raised and what she accomplished. Is there a place if you want to learn more that you might be able to visit . And last what would she say about whats going on in the country . We try to have a little objectivity with our subjects but it is hard not to be so impressed. Maggie walker was enslaved at the end of the civil war in Richmond Virginia and she said herself she grew up not with a silver spoon in her mouth but a wash basket up on her head. She grew up poor, but her circumstances in her life i think shaped her vision for black women in particular and of course she was intimately involved in the order of st. Lukes and became its president as a young woman in 1899 and transformed that organization. It was on its last leg in 1899 when she took over and she communicated this vision where she wanted to open up a store and a factory. They never were able to open up a factory. And 1903 she succeeded in doing that and opened up the st. Lukes Penny Savings Bank in 1903 which was the first bank to be led by a black woman and also to be largely financed by africanamerican women. She was also very active politically and socially all around the country. If you want to know more about her other than in my book, there is a great article that came out a couple of weeks ago in the wall street journal that focuses on rising women in the present day in banking and it kind of harkens back to the story of Maggie Walker, to kind of understand this phenomena of women in banking and if you are ever in richmond at her house, she had a beautiful mansion that she owned in richmond and the National Park service runs her house. You can also go online and do a virtual tour. There are many images and objects of the house and also of her and the various businesses and kind of black life in richmond. And then finally, i think that she would have a lot to say about the events that are going on today. In fact i would speak that in the midst of covid, she would have a lot to say about kind of reviving the kind of work she did with the st. Lukes bank and independent order of the insurance company. So she always talked about a black womans way of banking and i think we could learn a lot about banking that is attuned to the practical needs of the community that it served and centered so i think in the pandemic for example, she would argue about using sound and important lending criteria but erasing some of the structural institutional inequalities that are inherent in things like credit scores. So to look at multiple other kinds of sources to that peoples credit worthiness, small investments especially in black business, as we think of it as micro finance today. So, those are the kind of things i think if she were here today she would look around and be ready to roll up her sleeves and put her shoulder into the kind of transforming shrinking of the racial wealth gap which is what she tried to do in 1903 and what she would try to do in 2020. Host a great story that has meaning today. Its really incredible. We have a question from george rob asking do you know whether any st. Lukes counsel in the northern cities tried to organize a similar financial experiments . Yes, i do. I know that in philadelphia and some of the largest were harlem, philadelphia and dc, washington, d. C. And i know that in washington, d. C. They actually tried to do something very similar. They tried to build a st. Lukes paul and it was a model for creating a finance corporation that could raise the funds needed to invest in these ventures and they tried to do that in dc and its an interesting story but definitely in philadelphia and dc. And i also would say in the rural areas as well particularly in the south, but i am not as familiar with the north, that even on a small scale you had women raise thousands of dollars to build small brick or wood buildings so in places like getting there is one in lynchburg virginia and some other small towns throughout places in virginia where africanamerican women were able to do this on a smaller scale. The next question comes from the professor, good friend. He wants to know why do the banks and institutions disappear and how many if any are still around . There were over 100 banks that had been formed between 1888 when the first one was chartered in richmond which is kind of known as the cradle of black capitalism. But even on the eve of the Great Depression, part of the reason they disappeared had to do with many factors. Many of them could be attributed to structural racism, so you had these banks that were often limited in where they could operate and of course they focused largely on africanamericans who tended to make less money and they had difficulty accessing credit and also the banking knowledge of or banks were able to get, but i do want to say that even though these were crippling and very difficult and trying circumstances under which to try to make a banking venture go, africanamericans did innovate to try to overcome the barriers. There was the National NegroBankers Association that was first formed in 1907 and revived again in the 1920s. They would send people that had some Banking Experience out in the country to try to share what knowledge they had with these banks but often they were targeted by the kind of new banking regulations that on the one hand they seemed very neutral, but they were used by the state to wipe the black economic progress off the map. Then like other banks and Financial Institutions, they simply couldnt whether the storm of the Great Depression. So, coming through and out of the Great Depression there were about a dozen banks. But again there was a revival especially around world war i in the 50s and the number of black banks. A number of other changes there is a movement afoot that encourages all people to invest, to deposit 100 and 100 in a k to build them up so there is that hashtag of bank black and also a website i could look up called bank black usa. Org with that list. You could search by area code for the part of the country that you are in and it includes both online and brick and mortar banks. We have a handful that are still in existence today. Excellent, wonderful. I have a comment and a question from caitlin rose kennedy and she indicates she is a huge fan of your writing and lecturing skills. The question is about the ideas of racial uplift and if they tie into the running of the st. Lukes. For example the did it ever bar certain groups considered to be unfair to representatives of the race like poor unwed black women, did they ever bar them from participating in finance capitalism . Definitely respectability politics played a role in black finance and black capitalism, but not necessarily in restricting people who might have been considered spectacle from participating in these kind of financial uplift activities. In fact she was the product of rape and of course was surrounded by communities of women who had been subjected to racial and Sexual Violence and so it wasnt necessarily something that would kind of cast you out of the realm of respectability. So it was a path forward because these women had to take care of families and also were important the role in the community in terms of the philanthropy and the work in churches and activism so she saw lending as a respectable activity to lift themselves out of the poverty, but i do have to say that as the way she ran the bank and the insurance company, there was a point where she was a little oldfashioned and so the younger women who were able to take advantage of the opportunities, that first generation, women like Maggie Walker and her circle of women were able to provide this Younger Generation where they kind of chased under some of the restrictions. They didnt want to have a prayer devotional every morning before work. They wanted to wear colorful clothing and the latest fashion. They wanted to go to movies and listen to jazz music so there is a kind of politics of respectability which i think generationally about what the older generation of africanamerican women who are trying to provide these opportunities for the Younger Generation and the Younger Generation of women taking advantage of those opportunities but are wanting to kind of do things their own way. A. Before the next question i want to amplify from a couple questions ago because you write extensively on the stage Bank Examiners and how horrible they were to these banks and i think it was a North Carolina case where they were actually bragging about how they can go about and shut the banks down. Okay the next question wants to know the extent to which white and black men are white and black women supported the investment in st. Lukes. Its hard to tell but definitely Maggie Walker was really skilled in building interracial coalition. There were some things she knew she needed help with from the White Community of richmond to accomplish her vision and her goals and so in terms of the investment, there probably were just like in the friedman bank there probably were some who did have a small account in the bank or perhaps may have bought stock in the bank in order to show that they were progressive and supportive of these kinds of efforts for black progress, but black banks not just st. Lukes but many financial organizations in particular in the Insurance Companies really try to make a point that these were largely black controlled efforts uplifting the community and they made appeals to race pride. Some of them talked about and stressed that they were able to accomplish the things they were able to accomplish without white assistance or use of their services, so its a complex question. On the one hand, you have whites that as a show of support did participate minimally in the actual investment in these organizations, but africanamericans at the same time were stressing that they didnt really need or require the whites participation to really showcase on these organizations are progres that d i want to say that Economic Growth in business is an area where you could get buyin from a broad swath of whites from radicals to moderates. So there were people who could be staunchly segregationist, who could support the idea of a separate black economy and then you could have more liberal or moderate people who could also support a black separate economy so again the idea of race and whites participation and also their conception of the place of business and the separate economy on the one hand can be, they could have some progressive ideas but also some regressive ideas as well. We have a question asking how do we build black wealth today and what lessons can we learn from all those women in harlem that could help us today . How do we build wealth today i would Say Something that isnt really popular but i think reparations is an issue that needs serious consideration, so im hoping hr 40 will finally be debated and dealt with in congress and that bill is to create a commission to study the question of reparations not just for slavery but also Racial Discrimination and inequity even beyond slavery so i think thats one important step forward in terms of kind of closing the wealth gap and Building Wealth today and like i said about Maggie Walker, i also think that really and bracing some parts of her vision and the kind of activities of these st. Lukes women is a way to try to build wealth, to try to really look at Community Concern and to meet those needs which of course would take say raising large sums of money but by venturing the needs of the community that are articulated by the community, so for example this isnt like gentrification but actually listening to the places of the people in the communities and different spaces and Different Industries and asking what do you want, what do you need, and then crafting programs and tools to help them meet those needs and at the same time also really chipping away not chipping away, but really working to dismantle the kinds of barriers in their place. So here i will mention for example say about lending some people may say these communities are just not the same. They are declining or they are falling. But thats not an accident and so those banking and Financial Institutions in particular, those organizations including realtors and appraisers and those groups that help to create that situation knew then to mix the complexity and creating these kinds of pockets in these places where these kind of really stark inequalities exist and then after we can have an honest conversation of the complicity of that, then we can talk about now how do we dismantle some of the practices and the narratives that we have had about the particular places and these ideas again about the wealth and risk and opportunity and kind of redirect the conversation. Earlier you mentioned the friedmans bank and attempt after the civil war so im wondering if you can talk a little bit about that and you have a chapter of trying to get compensation and i dont think many people know about the friedmans bank so i wonder if you can just educate us a little bit on that. Believe it or not, they are doing a test if you hear the siren in the back. I will try to talk about little bit louder. The friedmans bank was created after the civil war, immediately after the civil war, 1865. It lasted nearly a decade to 1874. It was a bank that was formed to afford freed people, the former leformerly slaved. And it was in the charter one of the banks that were formed by and chartered by the federal gornment. So, we have the first bank of the United States, the second bank of the United States and the friedmans bank. And a board of allWhite Trustees because they didnt trust africanamericans to kind of know how to direct their financial futures. And there was a kind of change in the bank that allowed it to be of immense resources, of a billion dollars circulated in this bank in terms of modernday dollars in the decades that it operated. Through that corruption of the White Trustees and other people connected to the bank like the financiers of new york it led to the demise and lost millions of dollars of their deposits. Thats the kind of story i want to say in my book how they kind of subverted some of the plans and visions and limited economic visions of the White Trustees. The friedmans bank was not network the opportunity to lose that bank it convinces them that they needed to control their own Financial Institutions and so the kind of upside is that it started i love the question she thanks you and thanks you for elevating the finance i also think the pbs documentaries, the black experience in business is a start. Its two hours long. Im in that documentary and it could be like a series that to get a quick primer into a history of africanamerican business and wealth building so that documentary bought the black experience in business which was available to stream with pbs is important as well and then of course theres also so many other books. And then we tell people they want to like who they are voting for because it will be one he will be in his living room every night on tv but thats not true with donald trump the only has 42 percent Approval Rating he can win im not saying he will but he can because people dont like him dislike the way he operates as a vote for him because they like his attitude. Hello everyone i hope you can hear me. Thank you so much for joining us for this joint effort from american ancestors the historical and Genealogical Society the state library of massachusetts Publishers Weekly bookstore of the year