The historic emergence of intersectional leadership: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke

Abstract

Maggie Lena Walker arose from humble beginnings as the daughter of an ex-slave to become a prominent banker, entrepreneur, and community leader in the American state of Virginia in the early 1900s. She was the first African American woman in the United States to establish and lead a bank. In addition, Walker played a principal leadership role in a major African American mutual aid social service organization: the Independent Order of St. Luke. In this article, we investigate the historic emergence of intersectional leadership by exploring Walker’s leader identity development as Grand Secretary-Treasurer of the Independent Order of St. Luke. The method that we apply to the Walker case is intersectional microhistory, which is the study of unique social actors and the intersections of their gender, race, and other social categories as they change over time. We use our intersectional microhistory approach to unpack phenomenon of emerging intersectional leadership, offering deeper insights about the oppressive and multi-layered barriers that Maggie Walker surmounted as a black woman in order to effectively function as an acknowledged leader of the Independent Order of St. Luke.

Keywords

Intersectionality intersectional history Maggie Lena Walker black capitalism black feminism reflexivity

Out of the wilderness, out of the night

Has the black [wo]man crawled to the dawn of light,

Beaten by lashes and bound by chains,

A beast of burden with soul and brains,

[She]He has come thro’ sorrow and need and woe,

And the cry of [her]his heart is to know, to know.

– Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “The Black Man’s Claim” (1902)

Maggie Lena Walker arose from incredibly humble beginnings as the daughter of an enslaved woman to become a prominent banker, entrepreneur, and community leader in Virginia and the United States in the early 1900s. She was the first African American woman to establish and lead a bank. In addition, Walker played a principal leadership role in a major African American benefit insurance organization: the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL). Her acumen for managing money and people commanded significant positions of leadership during her career that led her to become a renowned and respected voice in the pursuit of economic liberation for not only African Americans but also women, especially women of color (Branch and Rice, 1997; Brown, 1989; Garrett-Scott, 2019).

The article opens with a verse from a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, an African American poet whose work influenced Walker. Wilcox’s poem “The Black Man’s Claim” appeared in the Colored American Magazine in 1902 (Wilcox, 1902). Originally written in a masculine voice, the poem represents the idea that African Americans received little beside their freedom after the U.S. Civil War. Walker clipped the poem and used quotes from it in her speeches, altering the words “man,” “he,” and “his” to “woman,” “she,” and “her” (Marlowe, 2003: 72). Hers was hardly a simple act of changing the gender to cover women. Walker’s edits recognized the intersecting spheres of race and gender; for a woman of color like herself, she felt the words had special significance given thwie oppression and discrimination African American women faced for being black and female (Brown, 1989).

The concept of intersectionality captures experiences of individuals marginalized at intersections of various identities, such as gender, race, class, ability, and other social categories (Collins, 2004; Crenshaw, 2000; Mercer et al., 2016; Richardson and Loubier, 2008). Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) popularized the use of the term intersectionality in the late 1980s. The concept, however, is not a new one. African American women reformers and Black Left activists employed intersectional analysis in their work as far back as the 1930s. Historians and other social scientists examining African American women’s experiences of discrimination utilize intersectionality to discuss the ways African American women experienced oppression, particularly racism and sexism, “simultaneously” (Brown, 1989: 613). The concept spread across disciplines and became popular in the 2000s owing to critical race theory and feminist scholars who broadened the concept by emphasizing the simultaneity of multiple social categories beyond gender and race (Collins, 1986, 1989, 2000; Hancock, 2007; Hooks, 1981).

Scholars, however, disagree about its precise definition and about its appropriate application as a research method (Collins and Bilge, 2016; Hancock, 2016; Jordan-Zachery, 2007; Mills, 2017; Nash, 2008; Ruel, Mills, and Thomas, 2018). Positivists, for example, conceptualize intersectionality in essentialist terms by specifying each category under consideration and examining their interactions (Hancock, 2016). In contrast, post-positivists argue that intersectional identity is “relational, situated in power, and often stereotyped such that those at the margins are forgotten, ignored, and marginalized” (Brah and Phoenix, 2004: 7). Thus, post-positivists view intersectionality as a vague, unitary, and malleable concept that reflects power relations of privilege that influence the identities and experiences of oppressed individuals (Mills, 2017).

With regard to black feminist critiques of intersectionality, some question the term’s theoretical utility, especially given what Nash (2019) describes as the term’s “citational ubiquity” (p. 3) in scholarship. Intersectionality has become a ubiquitous term given “its movement across disciplinary borders, across administrative/intellectual boundaries, and across academic/popular boundaries” (Nash, 2018: 37). The proliferation of the concept has widened scholars’ conceptual lens, but it has, in some instances, emptied the term of its specificity. Black feminist epistemology provides some correctives. The most important interventions include not only foregrounding African American women as producers and agents but also addressing inequality. While this article cannot address every critique of intersectionality as theory and practice, it endeavors to go beyond merely describing Walker’s experiences to centering her as an agent who used the IOSL to anchor her larger economic and political activism. In addition, this study pays attention to relations of power in different contexts (Collins and Bilge, 2016; Nash, 2019; Puar, 2007; Thomsen and Finley, 2019). Thus, this research uses intersectionality as a lens, illustrating the ways that different valences of identity, particularly gender and race, influence the construction, definition, and practice of leadership in specific contexts.

One way to increase the conceptual utility of intersectionality is to examine change over time as social categories are constructed in different ways in different contexts (Shaffner et al., 2019). Arguably, historicization of change within an intersectional framework captures both the contextual and time-specific ways in which powerful actors exhibit negative influence and marginalize others and the multiple ways people resist their marginalization. Understanding change in these dynamic relations and processes over time allows us to understand the lived experiences of the marginalized in society. Alternatively, it could help identify situations and instances where and when intersectional leadership emerges despite the oppressive constraints of power relations (Moorosi et al., 2018). Thus, we focus on the alternative historicization of change in intersectionality to explore the development of Maggie Walker’s leader identity.

The purpose of our paper is to unpack the historic emergence of Walker’s intersectional leadership in the context of the IOSL. In unpacking Walker’s background and business leadership, the paper reveals the risks, opportunities, and constraints faced by actors who must negotiate multiple identities, in this case race and gender. These multiple identities shape and are shaped by barriers as well as by opportunity structures in U.S. business. In some ways, then, Walker’s story is typical of other business leaders. In other ways, however, the prevalence of racism and sexism in the period under examination highlights Walker’s unique strategies for establishing legitimacy, building networks, and exercising power. Given existing gaps in wealth and power for women and communities of color, a historical examination provides lessons for tackling present-day issues for leaders, especially those seeking to build more diverse, inclusive, and effective teams.

To unpack the historic emergence of Walker’s intersectional leadership, we organize the paper in the following way. First, we provide the conceptual foundations for the notions of intersectional leadership and leadership emergence. Second, to undergird our methodological approach in this study, we explain how our use of intersectional microhistory emphasizes the tenets and questions suggested by Shaffner et al. (2019). Third, we present the findings of our intersectional analysis of the emergence of Maggie Walker’s intersectional leadership in the IOSL. In conclusion, we outline the implications of our study.

Conceptual foundations

The intersectional view of leadership examines how leadership opportunities emerge at the intersection of simultaneously varied dimensions/categories of social inequality (Breslin et al., 2017). The intersectional lens allows for a perspective of how intersectional leadership emerges over time within different vectors of disadvantage, which is vital in studies of leadership (Byrd, 2008; Shamir, 2011). Through an intersectional lens, the paper explores how Maggie Walker ascended to leadership in the IOSL, thus defying the socially ascribed norms and expectations about both African American’s and women’s capacity for business in the period, while alternately revealing ways she worked outside of interlocking structural inequities linked to racial oppression and gender discrimination (Richardson and Loubier, 2008). Specifically, the use of an intersectional lens applied to the context of leadership helps us understand how those who are marginalized across multiple social categories (e.g. gender, race, class) disrupt power relations.

We examine the emergence of Walker’s intersectional leadership within a historical frame to capture its change under the “intersecting dynamics of power, difference, and context” (Riad, 2011: 831). We also unpack the theoretical concept of intersectional leadership using the historical case of Walker and the IOSL (Sanchez-Hucles and Davis, 2010). In particular, we unpack how Walker, born enslaved near the end of the Civil War, overcame the barriers of race and gender to become the leader of a financial services empire. She was the United States’ first African American female president of a bank, a position that she held for over three decades, from 1903 when the St. Luke Bank opened to her death in 1934. The bank, which changed its name to Consolidated Bank and Trust in 1929, was the longest-operating African American-controlled bank until its sale in 2011. She also led the IOSL, one of the most successful fraternal insurance societies in the country, from 1899 to her death in 1934. At its height, the IOSL boasted over 100,000 members in 22 states and had more than $121 million (in 2019 U.S. dollars) insurance in force (westegg.com). It continued offering insurance through the 1970s (Marlowe, 2003: xv). Moreover, we want to reveal how Walker led successfully while experiencing situations of racism and sexism that threatened to undermine her authority and influence.

Leadership emergence is the “process by which individuals become influential in the perceptions of others” over time through dynamic interactions across multiple levels (e.g. individual, group, organizational, community, and societal) (Acton et al., 2019: 1). Her leader role identity influenced this process, which is both time- and context-sensitive. Leader role identity is “the extent to which an individual views himself or herself as a leader” (Kwok et al., 2018: 1). The related research question that we want to examine in this historical study is how Maggie Walker managed to sustain her leadership role given her intersecting identities.

Methodological approach

Foundations of intersectional microhistory

In this study, we use a microhistorical lens to unpack the emergence of Maggie Walker’s intersectional leadership in the IOSL. Microhistory closes in on a unique research subject to develop comprehensive insights about larger phenomenon and processes, in our case, to understand the emergence of intersectional leadership (Lugar et al., 2018; Novicevic and Mills, 2019). In particular, intersectional microhistory involves an examination of intersectionality over time (Shaffner et al., 2019). Intersectional microhistory examines change in the lives of unique actors over time in the past and within intersecting identities (Weigand et al., 2017).

We apply this method, grounded by the four tenets of intersectional history proposed by Shaffner et al. (2019), to the unique historic case of Maggie Walker’s intersectional leadership in the IOSL. The first tenet, concerned with critique, posits that researchers should destabilize and challenge commonly held beliefs and narratives, which include not only assumptions about the incompatibility of intersectionality and leadership but also reflect racial and gender stereotypes. Our study destabilizes conventional views that assume African American women did not reach leadership positions in the financial industry before the late 20th century because of the significant structural and institutional disadvantages of racism and sexism. Some examples of these disadvantages include lack of access to education, racially segregated markets, and stereotypes that judged African Americans and women as less intelligent, less rational, and otherwise unfit to manage and run complex financial empires. However, Maggie Walker placed among a number of African Americans and women who were able to surmount difficult barriers that contributed to their marginalization and exclusion to create and run successful financial services businesses like banks and insurance companies (Garrett-Scott, 2016).

The second tenet, commitment to reflexivity, posits that reflexivity about potential researchers’ bias is crucial in crafting narratives based on new insights (Ford et al., 2012). In this study, we engage in reflexivity in analyzing and reinterpreting archival materials related to Maggie Walker and the IOSL to develop new interpretations, meanings, and narratives about the emergence of intersectional leadership in the period. Reflexivity helps ensure intellectual rigor by revealing the complicated and multifaceted factors shaping historical actors like Walker’s leadership decisions and actions. In addition, as Atewologun (2019) explains, intersectional reflexivity goes beyond merely identifying the subject’s multiple, salient, intersecting identities to articulating the meaning and import of these identities within the subject’s critical social and institutional domains (p. 9). Intersectionality is not only a conceptual approach but also a methodology for engaging in reflexivity.

The third tenet, centering power, posits that understanding how power is distributed and exercised allows researchers to identify and uncover the power-laden changes in dynamic relationships between the privileged and the marginalized individuals and groups across any given time period (Collins and Bilge, 2016). Walker and the IOSL resisted power to overcome barriers and disrupt traditional narratives. We strive to understand the power dynamics of who was privileged and who was marginalized in the place and the time period of this study. In particular, our work reveals ways that Walker used economic autonomy to carve out a space to actualize rights and privileges customarily denied African Americans and women in the period (Garrett-Scott, 2019; Gill, 2010).

The fourth tenet, the consideration of time, emphasizes the relevance of temporality by analyzing when the significance of intersectionality changed in the eyes of the powerful actors over different periods of time. As the IOSL became more successful over time, it simultaneously opened doors of opportunity and confronted new challenges. Our use of the temporal framework highlights how changes in the relationships between those that are powerful and privileged with those who are marginalized may become ingrained in related narratives. The four tenets of the intersectional history serve as guideposts for our application of intersectional microhistory as a method of analyzing Maggie Walker and the IOSL.

Intersectional microhistory as a method

Intersectional microhistory adopts from intersectional history a methodological focus on seeking answers to the questions of what, who, how, and when as they relate to a specific subject of research interest (e.g. the emergence of Walker’s intersectional leadership in the IOSL). Answering the “what” question involves following traces of the past that can be found in the primary sources, such as business correspondence, archival resources, annual reports, newsletters, biographies, autobiographies, commissioned histories, interviews, or other forms of information that contain the case-relevant data. Although we were able to utilize a broad variety of sources, it is important to note that we worked from a fragmented archive. For example, we had to contend with gaps in the organizational minutes and financial records for the IOSL. We combine primary sources with secondary sources. The three definitive secondary sources on Walker’s life are the essay by Elsa Barkley Brown, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke” (1989), which situates Walker’s far-reaching influence in Black feminism; the biography by Gertrude Woodruff Marlow, A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment (2003), which explains Maggie Walker’s role in empowering black women in the late 1800s and early 1900s; and the monograph by Shennette Garrett-Scott, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (2019), which underscores the impact of race and gender in early 20th-century U.S. finance capitalism by highlighting the IOSL and the St. Luke Bank. Through careful and critical readings of these archival fragments and rich secondary texts, we strive to uncover the theme of emerging intersectional leadership exhibited by Maggie Walker and other actors involved in the context of the IOSL.

Answering the “who” question involves identifying both the privileged and the marginalized actors based on traces preserved in the archives and using these traces to reconstruct a narrative from an intersectional perspective. In using secondary sources (e.g. books and journal articles), researchers must focus not only on what the authors highlight but also what they omit relative to the powerful and marginalized actors in terms of their race, gender, age, class, and other social categories. In this study, we examine specific struggles of Maggie Walker, an African American woman climbing to an executive position in an industry dominated by Whites and by men.

Answering the “how” question involves engaging in close readings of sources to uncover how intersectional identities of actors changed over time. We pay close attention to the relationships between the powerful and marginalized actors and how they emerged and transformed over time. Different aspects of intersectionality became important to different extents at different points in the past. Finally, answering the “when” question involves examining the time-sensitive fragments from the past in terms of how they reflect the shifts in intersectionality over time. In this case, we focus on the time period and the context addressed by the traces under review.

Intersectional microhistory of Maggie Walker’s leadership

Background information on the early black financial industry in America

The story of African American entrepreneurship, particularly financial services like insurance and banking, begins even before the earliest Africans arrived on the shores of North America (Kuyk, 1983; Walker, 1998). In the colonial and antebellum periods, both free and enslaved African Americans utilized banks. Free Blacks served as informal bankers and invested in bank stock (Walker, 1998). After the Civil War, the creation of the Freedman’s Bank and Trust Company allowed African Americans widespread use of banks. The Freedman’s Bank operated 37 branches in 17 states, which were located mostly in the South. It closed in 1874 due to financial mismanagement by the all-White trustees of the bank. In less than 10 years, the bank had 70,000 depositors and handled more than $57 million in deposits (Levy, 2012). African Americans felt discouraged by the failure of the bank and the loss of their wealth. They became more convinced, however, of the need to control their own institutions.

Secret and mutual aid societies provided important economic, social, and political functions in African American communities. African American secret societies melded African secret societies and European friendly societies, and proved to be very popular. Although accurate membership is impossible to calculate, it is estimated that 10,000 enslaved and free African Americans had joined over 200 secret societies by the 1840s, and by First World War membership reached millions across the nation (Beito, 2000; Gelman, 2006). In the late 19th century, African American secret societies created the earliest banks to house their considerable assets. Reverend William W Browne, founder and head of the Grand United Fountain of True Reformers, organized the first African American-owned bank, the True Reformers Savings Bank, in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888 (Burrell and Johnson, 1909).

Most African American fraternal insurance societies were headed by men, even those that welcomed both men and women to their membership. A few exclusively female societies existed. Most male societies created separate women auxiliaries. For example, the Masons created the women’s auxiliary, the Order of the Easter Star, and the Knights of Pythias created the Court of Calanthe. Societies like the Masons and Pythians represented bastions of male influence and leadership. Male fraternal leaders took a paternalistic attitude toward their fraternal insurance business and its primary beneficiaries: widows and orphans. In highly gendered terms, African American male fraternal leaders determined that men were the proper producers and consumers of insurance products. While women first worked within the narrow gender expectations, they gradually expanded into women’s auxiliaries where they worked independently of male authority (Garrett-Scott, 2016).

Private insurance policies from major insurance companies like Prudential and Metropolitan Life were luxuries reserved for the middle and elite classes. Most poor and working-class African Americans could not afford these whole life insurance policies. In addition, white-owned insurance companies discriminated against African Americans. The racist pseudo-science of eugenics, which gained momentum in the late 19th, argued that African Americans were not only inherently inferior in vitality but also prone to social and physical disease (Beito, 2000; Chapin, 2012; Garrett-Scott, 2016).

Fraternal insurance, then, rose to fill in the gap between the lack of services and consideration from the private insurance industry and the growing need for more robust protections for African American workers and professionals. The reasons for the popularity of fraternal insurance were practical (to provide protections) as well as idealistic. Fraternal societies offered much more than the average insurance company: they provided opportunities for sociability, communal economic development, and leadership. In addition, fraternal leaders’ appeals to the masses stressed charity, autonomy, self-help, and virtue.

Racism and sexism exacerbated constraints in the capitalistic marketplace which was inherent with the system of laws and customs referred to as Jim Crow. Segregation largely excluded African Americans from participating in the broader financial world dominated by white Americans (Garrett-Scott, 2019). Yet, this exclusion also helped produce a separate black economy through which African American entrepreneurs, including women, provided services and goods for an almost exclusively African American consumer base. Entrepreneurs often made appeals to racial pride and as a result a number of businesses, including financial services, emerged and often out-performed White-owned companies (Ellsworth, 1982; Walker, 1998).

The competition proved a double-edged sword. Many African American-controlled banks and insurance companies gained marginal acceptance from some White elites who believed that segregated economies kept the aspirations of African Americans in check, but they also attracted extralegal violence. One well-known example is the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, which decimated the well-known Black Wall Street in the segregated Greenwood section of the city (Ellsworth, 1982; Messer et al., 2013; Garrett-Scott, 2019).

While African American men enjoyed great respect in their communities as the heads of these financial services companies and organizations, they discouraged women in general from the finance field, as this business area was perceived as a man’s domain (Brown, 1989; Garrett-Scott, 2016, 2019). Ironically, the gender and racial norms of Jim Crow allowed black women to advocate for social change through the creation of financial service organizations (Garrett-Scott, 2019; Gilmore, 1996). It was from these contradictory intersections that Maggie Walker established her intersectional leadership and led the IOSL.

Background information on the IOSL

The IOSL was a society organized and led by African American women that played a significant role in the lives of black community members from the mid-19th and early 20th centuries in the United States (Brown, 1989; Garrett-Scott, 2019; Marlowe, 2003; Rowlinson and Hassard, 1993; Rowlinson and Proctor, 1999). We examine this transformational fraternal order through an intersectional lens to highlight the actor networks involved in its organizing process. The IOSL had its historical roots in the St. Luke Society, created in the 1850s by Mary Ann Prout, a free black woman living in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1867, Prout established the Grand United Order of St. Luke (GUOSL) in order to diversify the organization and target a new market of social work.

Two years later, in 1869, a faction of the GUOSL located in Virginia broke off from the organization and formed the Independent Order of the Sons and Daughters of St. Luke, later shortened to the Independent Order of St. Luke. The IOSL was not only dedicated to social reform and service work, following its roots in the St. Luke Society, but it also offered life insurance to African Americans. Maggie Walker took over the IOSL leadership in 1899, and she sparked optimism and hope among the working-class African American women who were members of the society. Moreover, she inspired them to be resilient and vigilant in the face of the overwhelming marginalization and oppression experienced at that time.

Background information on Maggie Walker

Maggie Walker was a self-determined woman who knew the hardships and realities that African American women faced post-Reconstruction. For example, her mother worked for low wages as a laundress when Walker was growing up because relatively few alternative opportunities existed for employment of African American women. As a child, Walker often helped her mother at work by transporting buckets of water for cleaning or by replenishing fuel for the fire. In addition to helping her mother, Walker attended school and did quite well academically. While in high school, she found part-time work as a clerk, first with the True Reformers and then the IOSL. After graduation, she became a schoolteacher and was a member of various groups. One group in particular was the IOSL and her dedication, membership, and exceptional service opened an opportunity for her to further influence members of the community (Brown, 1989; Garrett-Scott, 2019; Marlowe, 2003; Ransom, 2009).

Three years after graduation from Armstrong Colored Normal School, in 1886, Walker married Armstead Walker (Jr). Armstead’s family operated a brick contracting company and enjoyed an upper-middle-class lifestyle. The couple had three children together, but unfortunately one of them passed away before turning one. Walker was forced to give up teaching after she married because the laws in Virginia did not allow married women to teach. As a wife of a man who was part of the African American elite, Walker could have chosen to spend her time focused on homemaking and middle-class society, but her interests lay in activism and business, which she perceived as the vehicles of opportunity for African American women.

Although firmly ensconced among the Black elite of Richmond, she did not forget her humble beginnings: “I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but with a laundry basket practically on my head. I have come up on the rough side of the mountain” (quoted in Marlowe, 2003: 5). Walker often used this quote in her public speeches. The public acknowledgment of her impoverished background represented more than rhetorical affect. It informed the foundation of her business model. She worked to create financial products that helped poor and working-class women in particular and African Americans in general. Illness or an injury at work could plunge an already economically vulnerable family into serious financial straits. Low-cost insurance that provided the equivalent of a week’s or even a few days’ wages represented an important financial hedge against losing a home or apartment. While the IOSL experimented with some early forms of insurance in the 1890s, Walker pursued business opportunities as a co-owner of the Woman’s Union (WU) where she acquired experience that enhanced her skills and talents. The WU was an all-women’s enterprise that offered low-cost insurance. It also operated a grocery store, boarding house, and school. To advance further her business knowledge, she signed up for night school and took classes in accounting even though it was a male-dominated field (Brown, 1989; Garrett-Scott, 2019; Marlowe, 2003).

As a prudent businesswoman, Walker climbed the ranks of the IOSL and in 1985 created and led the Juvenile Division. Her innovative juvenile insurance feature eventually outperformed the adult plans which struggled to remain profitable in the 1890s. In spite of her new division’s success, she struggled to garner the support and recognition that her work deserved because the male leadership of the IOSL did not see how a program designed by a woman that targeted women and children would be sustainable in the long run. Speaking about her earlier experiences, she confided to an audience, “Some of the strongest and brainiest men dropped from the ranks of the Order and waited patiently for the grand old Order to drop in pieces” (50th Anniversary: 33). These men were reticent to grant to a woman the role identity of leader (Garrett-Scott, 2019; Marlowe, 2003; Mayo and Smith, 2008).

At the time of Walker’s election to the IOSL, William Forrester served as Secretary-Treasurer and oversaw the insurance arm. However, the board of directors and members were increasingly dissatisfied with his uninspired leadership and with the lack of growth in the IOSL. Maggie Walker, as an emerging new power player, believed that financial services would be the key to true security and stability. By 1899, due to mismanagement and poor strategic decisions by top management, the IOSL was bankrupt with less than $35 dollars in the bank account and debts of more than $400. Moreover, with a third of the councils having closed their doors, Forrester questioned the viability of the organization, saw all of these markers as failures, and stepped down from the IOSL (Brown, 1989; Garrett-Scott, 2019; Marlowe, 2003; Schiele et al., 2005).

The emergence of Maggie Walker’s intersectional leadership in the IOSL

Maggie Walker felt differently than Forrester about the challenges facing the IOSL, as she saw opportunities for the IOSL’s growth and revival. She effectively projected her passionate optimism and the members of the organization elected her Right Worthy Grand Secretary of the IOSL in 1899. By the second year of her leadership, the IOSL gained 30 new councils and 3000 new members, most of who were working women working as teachers, nurses, stenographers, washerwomen, seamstresses, and farmers. Together, they resurrected the IOSL and moved the organization forward (Branch and Rice, 1984; Brown, 1989; Garrett-Scott, 2019; Marlowe, 2003). These women saw Maggie Walker as their new leader.

Walker believed the focus on financial services was the right path for the IOSL’s future. She mandated that all councils participate in the insurance program or else be suspended and fined. This step represented a direct claim to a leader identity (DeRue and Ashford, 2010), as indirect claims and cues from a woman of color in this context would have struggled to gain support (Garrett-Scott, 2019). She grasped the need for relational recognition of her leadership role; however, at the same time, she also did not want to replicate the autocratic leadership style of her predecessor (Cunliffe and Eriksen, 2011). Therefore, to encourage participation, Walker assembled a leadership team that worked closely with local councils to find the right way to frame the new mandate requirement in palatable terms. By emphasizing that the IOSL’s goal was to support the members and not profit from them, Walker’s team managed to build mutual trust with the members over time. The members began to see that service, education, and community engagement remained priorities under the new administration and their grants of relational recognition began to stabilize and strengthen Walker’s leader identity (DeRue and Ashford, 2010). The large majority of the subordinate councils operating under Walker complied with the new regulations by the end of the first year of her tenure (Brown, 1989; Garrett-Scott, 2019; Marlowe, 2003), which was an indication that the collective endorsement of her leader identity was beginning to emerge from her broader social group (Humphreys et al., 2015).

Faced with seemingly insurmountable constraints as she took over the leadership of the struggling IOSL, but with growing confidence in her identity as a leader, Walker hired four women to work at the headquarters to help her navigate the tumultuous situations facing the future of the organization. Her participatory efforts proved successful; she implemented new revenue streams, increased insurance benefits, expanded the number of councils, and decentralized decision making, all of which helped the organization grow into one of the largest and wealthiest African American-controlled fraternal insurance organizations in the country. Through her intersectional leadership, the transformational outcome was the realization of Walker’s inspirational vision to provide economic and social security for the black community in general and black women in particular (Brown, 1989; Duckworth, 1992; Garrett-Scott, 2019; Marlowe, 2003).

Walker understood what it meant for working women to be seen as socially unacceptable and to be expected to serve Whites and be dependent on men. She wanted to help working women use their investments in the IOSL to better their lives and assert their important economic roles in their families and communities. As a powerful orator, she proposed a bold vision for the IOSL:

First we need a savings bank. Let us put our moneys together; let us use our moneys; let us put our money out at usury among ourselves, and reap the benefit ourselves. Let us have a bank that will take the nickels and turn them into dollars. (50th Anniversary: 23)

Walker’s vision also called for developing businesses, including a store and a factory, that would support the community, build wealth, and provide jobs. She envisioned the IOSL as an institution that provided security through financial autonomy. Most African American women were limited to low-paid and low-skilled labor such as domestic work and agricultural labor. Additionally, negative stereotypes about African American women’s intellect and sexuality circulated widely in U.S. popular culture and society. Thus, the sense of autonomy and security Walker wanted African American women to possess would be accomplished by tailoring the services of her banking and insurance company to reduce the critical impact that race and gender discrimination had on their economic and social lives.

On 3 November 1903, Walker not only initiated the formation but also assumed leadership of the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. This significant accomplishment was achieved as a result of the accumulation of resources, knowledge, skills, and networks that she acquired over time. It is also further intimation of the rising internalization of her leader identity (see DeRue and Ashford, 2010). Walker never forgot to praise those around her for the IOSL and the bank’s success. She confessed (Marlowe, 2003: 56):

I love these black men and women who have so loyally stood by me and my work: I love these boys and girls whose young feet are not yet blistered by a long tramp over life’s rough and ragged roads: I love these silvery[-]headed men and women upon whose experience and advice I have so largely depended and am now depending. …God knows I love this race of mine, especially the women.

The bank institutionalized Walker’s enthusiasm. It instilled a future-oriented optimism throughout the community by offering a variety of financial services that increased its customers’ wealth through savings accounts and through investments in business and property holdings.

As President of the bank, Walker ensured that the bank’s operations and lending procedures truly reflected the needs of the African American community, especially women and girls. The focus on economic security was aimed at overcoming gender, race, and class barriers. The bank and the community of Jackson Ward, the predominately African American section of Richmond, thrived. Moreover, these leadership acts further strengthened Walker’s leader identity because they were reciprocally recognized and collectively endorsed widely from within her social context (Humphreys et al., 2015).

Indeed, there is evidence that Walker’s identity as a leader had become legitimized as a social reality and diffused within the broader societal environment as well (DeRue and Ashford, 2010; Luhrmann and Eberl, 2007). The process of leader identity development is rarely a neutral endeavor but one in which “power struggles take place” (Humphreys et al., 2015: 1405). As a result, as Maggie Walker became acknowledged as a credible leader in her domain (Karp and Helgo, 2009) even by the dominant white society, her leader identity was further distilled and fortified through contestation. The reciprocal relationship between endorsement and contestation has been shown to play an important role in the refinement and internalization of leader identity in persons of color (see Novicevic et al., 2019).

The successes of the IOSL would draw attention, pressure, and challenge from outsiders. Beginning around the mid-1900s, state regulators put pressure on African American fraternal organizations. The IOSL’s 1905 report noted the state’s increasing “heavy requirements” (50th Anniversary: 30). Walker believed that the financial success and growing economic independence of financial organizations like IOSL were under attack, especially in southern states. She called the community’s attention to the machinations of state regulators. She queried a standing-room-only audience in 1907, “Why has each State an Insurance Commission now? Why are we compelled to disclose even to the smallest particular, our membership, our money and our methods of obtaining and disbursing the same? What think you of this?” (50th Anniversary Report: 32). Rather than run from the challenges, the IOSL would continue to prepare itself, proclaimed Walker, “to [with]stand all financial storms” (50th Anniversary: 33).

On 15 October 1908, Walker’s portents about the machinations of state commissioners against African American fraternal organizations came true. When Walker was bedridden with an injury that would keep her disabled for months, examiners with the Virginia Insurance Commission made an unexpected and unannounced visit to the St. Luke offices to conduct a full audit of the IOSL when Walker was bedridden with an injury. The IOSL passed the insurance commission’s surprise audit, and Walker praised the IOSL as moving up to a new milestone in its history. In 1909, she said the IOSL had passed “from an old-fashioned, old-timed [sic] secret benevolent society” into “a fraternal endowment association” (50th Anniversary: 36). The successful audit also demonstrated her effectiveness as a leader in inspiring and developing followers, as leadership is best observed in the behaviors and outcomes of followers (Uhl-Bien et al., 2014). Recognizing these acts of leader effectiveness would also likely enhance the intensity of internalization of her leader identity (Humphreys et al., 2015).

For women, the meaning of Walker’s fully formed leadership identity and success in fraternal insurance and banking held profound implications. The IOSL was the largest employer of white-collar jobs for black women in Richmond and arguably in the country. Walker believed that the IOSL’s successes expanded the so-called women’s sphere. For African American women this was doubly important because they were expected to focus on the home but often had to seek work outside of the home to supplement men’s lower wages. Women often found themselves trapped in low-paying, dangerous, and hard work. Walker challenged the confines of the African American women’s sphere that would “circumscribe every woman to the hearth, the broom, the washtub, the ironing board, and the cooking stove. … As ability [and] adaptability decide [careers] for men, so let them decide for women” (Marlowe, 2003: 61). On another occasion, she insisted, “Let woman choose her own vocation, just as man does his. Let her go into business, let her make money, let her become independent” (Marlowe, 2003: 65).

The 1920s continued to be a busy and active time for the IOSL as its leadership felt constant pressure to add new members. Seemingly comfortable with her identity as leader, Walker sent several circular letters every year encouraging the hundreds of IOSL councils to put forth “special effort” to recruit new members and make the councils and the national organization “stronger” and “better” (Garrett, 2011: 258). Walker also created contests to build membership. For example, a popular contest among Richmond councils was the Red and Blue Rally. The team that recruited the most members was honored at a special citywide rally held at the end of March (Notice – Richmond Councils, 14 February 1924).

As Walker recognized and accepted her acknowledged and endorsed role as leader, she took time out of her busy schedule to make trips to visit councils throughout the state. She arranged large meetings in centrally located towns and cities that she called Inspiration Meetings. With her leader identity fully formed, she expected councils to bring a certain quota of new members to hear her or a designated speaker. She challenged local councils to get at least 10 or so new members before her visit. The council with the most new members was honored in a public ceremony and Walker would help induct the new members during her official visit. Walker was especially active in Virginia but did travel to other states. In 1924, for example, Walker traveled to Delaware, Maryland, Chicago, and New York (Circular letters from Maggie Walker to: Subordinate Councils of Delaware and Maryland, 1 May 1924).

Organizing Deputies, paid organizers within the IOSL, often called on Walker to assist them in their individual recruiting efforts around the country. Additionally, Walker remained very active in running the juvenile circles throughout Virginia. She showed particular interest in the Richmond circles, which represented about 3000 children in the mid-1920s.

Furthermore, she worked closely with matrons overseeing arrangements for the children’s annual Easter exercises and the annual St. Luke Juvenile Rally throughout the IOSL’s 22-date territory. Matrons with the most juveniles at the rally won a cash prize. Every matron who added new juveniles appeared in a special section of the St. Luke Herald, the official organ of the IOSL which reached 10,000 subscribers each week (Dabney, 1927). The economic prizes and public recognition worked together as critical incentives and inspirational motivation tools to support her organizational vision (Garrett, 2011).

The IOSL had to grow and change with the times. In particular, it had to become more competitive with the increasing number of African American-owned private insurance companies offering legal reserve and whole life products. Whole life insurance, as investment products, provided higher death benefits and accumulated cash value, which owners could borrow or allow to accrue. When the IOSL introduced a whole life product in 1929, Walker dispatched her assistant Lillian H Payne to canvass the state as part of a drive to sign up at least 6000 new policyholders. Rather than focus on working-class African American women, she now confidently focused on the African American middle class. Working-class IOSL members, however, struggled to afford the higher payments for the new life insurance product. The Great Depression made it difficult for all IOSL members to afford even basic needs, yet the IOSL persisted beyond the 1930s and continued to provide insurance products into the 1970s (Garrett, 2011).

The emergence of Maggie Walker’s intersectional leadership in Richmond

In addition to her leadership in the IOSL, Walker also worked tirelessly for the African American community in Richmond and beyond. Two examples of her most important community activism include the streetcar boycott in 1904 and suffrage in the early 1920s. These actions also appear to reveal the strength of Maggie Walker’s leader identity.

In 1904, Virginia enacted ordinances that segregated public transportation. Although public transportation was of little personal concern for Walker, she understood that the IOSL was a democratic organization that represented women and men from various socioeconomic backgrounds: laborers, domestics, merchants, teachers, college professors, clerks, doctors, lawyers, and civil servants who relied on public means of transportation. Walker, along with the presidents of three other African American banks in Richmond, pledged their institutions’ financial support for an African American-owned transit company. As an executive officer of the Richmond Negro Business League, Walker helped initiate the League’s emptying of its treasury to pay legal fees to fight the Jim Crow car ordinance. Walker also used the pages of the IOSL’s newspaper, the St. Luke Herald, to urge members and readers throughout Virginia and other states not to stand still for Jim Crow insults (Garrett-Scott, 2019; Marlowe, 2003).

As Walker and the IOSL became a veritable success in the 1920s, boasting 100,000 members, Walker lent her reputation and image to important social causes. She had long supported empowering women politically. In her address at the 1912 National Association of Colored Women convention, Walker linked economic and political power. She said, “yet Capital is deaf—and will never hear their cries, until women force Capital to hear them at the ballot box, and to be just and honest to them as to the men” (quoted in Garrett-Scott, 2019: 160). After passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote in 1920, Walker wasted no time organizing African American women to exercise their new right. She helped to form a committee of activist women whose goal was to register as many African American women as possible before the registration deadline. These are the actions of an individual that has fully internalized a leader identity (Humphreys et al., 2015).

As the accepted leader, Walker was elected committee chair. She soon mobilized IOSL councils around the state to attend a number of mass meetings organized by the committee, and helped register over 4800 African American voters, including 2410 women. More women possibly could have been registered but the segregated lines at the Registrar building moved slowly for African American applicants, and clerks frequently challenged African American women’s qualifications. By this point in her identity development, Maggie Walker could not only withstand contestation, but her intersectional leader identity was fortified and internalized to the extent that she could in turn challenge others in positions of power (Garrett-Scott, 2019; Marlowe, 2003).

In her lifetime, Walker served in leadership positions the boards of local, state, and national civil rights organizations, such as the Negro Organization of Virginia, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Association of Colored Women, as well as interracial organizations, such as the Virginia Interracial Committee. She was active in community service organizations, such as establishing the Community House and securing a visiting nurse for African American residents in Richmond. She served as trustee for major African American women’s educational institutions, such as Virginia Union University in Richmond and the National Training School in Washington, DC. The IOSL was the largest employer of African American women in Richmond and arguably the largest employer of white-collar African American women in the country. When she passed away in 1934, thousands attended her funeral, including prominent white civic leaders in Richmond. One year later in 1935, a fitting tribute in the Richmond Planet printed a picture of Walker with these words underneath: “As a memorial to Mrs. Maggie L. Walker who spent her life trying to enhance the political and civil fortunes of her people” (Marlowe, 2003: 254–255). Thus, Walker linked her role identity as a leader and civic activism with creating economic opportunities for women in the IOSL and many other organizations.

Contributions, limitations, and avenues for future research

Historical studies of leadership that involve complex social situations should not reduce interpretation to a singular category; rather, they should enable understanding of leader experiences “from the effects of inextricably connected roles and situations” (Richardson and Loubier, 2008: 143). In this article, we contribute to the extant literature by unpacking the emergence of Maggie Walker’s intersectional leadership. By focusing on her leader identity within the context of her leadership in the IOSL, we explicate her incredible journey and interpret how she confronted the intersecting socially ascribed norms and constraints of her time (i.e. racism and sexism) to achieve acknowledgement and acceptance as a respected leader.

Studies involving role identity are important to the advancement of the leadership research domain and historical approaches can be effective in unpacking complex identity processes (Humphreys et al., 2015). In particular, microhistory approaches may allow leadership researchers to uncover latent concepts by revealing important historical traces (Novicevic et al., 2019). Thus, we hope that our work encourages greater use of microhistorical and other historical methods (Durepos and Mills, 2012).

We also intend to contribute by demonstrating the value of intersectionality to leadership research by applying intersectional microhistory as a research method. Using a microhistorical lens allowed us to examine intersectionality with our unique subject, Maggie Walker, over time and across leadership roles, as she led the IOSL. Jordan-Zachery (2007: 255) argues that studies approaching intersectionality should be contextualized and focused on the lived experiences of case subjects in order to decenter “normativity.” Although Walker experienced the overlapping spheres of discrimination and marginalization associated with being black and female in her time period, she internalized the role identity of leader and was relationally recognized and collectively endorsed (and contested – see Novicevic et al., 2019) by others in her social environment.

Intersectionality, however, must also be mentioned in terms of limitations. “The term intersectionality references the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that, in turn, shape complex social inequalities” (Collins, 2015: 2).

While there appears to be consensus around this general concept, there are still definitional challenges and variance in the ways intersectionality is used, underpinned, and portrayed in the extant literature (Collins and Chepp, 2013). However, we argue that the rich data provided by unique historical case studies offer leadership researchers an opportunity to unpack this complex phenomenon within context (Humphreys et al., 2015; Jordan-Zachery, 2007) using a microhistorical lens (Novicevic et al., 2019).

Also, all forms of interpretive research encounter the potential limitation of subjectivism (Ketokivi and Mantere, 2010). While interpretive analyses do promote reflexivity over replication, these approaches also often provide more compelling insights than empirical studies may produce (Humphreys et al., 2015; Siggelkow, 2007). Moreover, our intersectional microhistory method permitted us to focus on the lived experience of our unique subject Maggie Walker, which has provided insights regarding the power relationships of her time alongside the overlapping social identity phenomena.

Because of the definitional challenges still inherent with the concept of intersectionality, future research opportunities are quite broad. Although our study largely emphasized the intersection of race and gender, the numerous other reciprocally constructing phenomena described by Collins (2015) should be further scrutinized in order to determine similar mechanisms that shape multifaceted social disparities. Also, while we have advocated for microhistorical approaches to examine intersectionality, future research should include other methodologies, as well as additional leadership actors and time periods, to explore this complex theoretical concept.

Conclusion

Through a detailed, reflexive, and critical reading of traces of the past about the emergence of Maggie Lena Walker’s intersectional leadership of the IOSL, we have uncovered how she contributed to community development, thus paving the way for black women’s economic freedom and security during the time following the emancipation of African Americans in the United States of America. We revealed this emergence by applying the intersectional microhistory method in our analysis of her unique case. The main finding of the analysis is that, “Walker’s bravery in the face of unrelenting opposition reveals how the victimization of oppression can be transformed into victories for the oppressed” (Schiele et al., 2005: 35).

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Caleb W Lugar is a PhD student at the University of Mississippi studying management in the School of Business Administration. He holds an Education Specialist degree from Liberty University, an MBA from the University of Mississippi, and bachelors from the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published a book chapter on generative leadership and his other research interests include intersectional leadership, servant leadership, and expatriate studies.

Shennette Garrett-Scott (PhD University of Texas – Austin) is an assistant professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. She researches history of gender, race, and business with a focus on the role of black women in the financial industry. Her book, “Banking on Freedom” forthcoming Fall 2018, Columbia University Press) is the first full-length history of finance capitalism that centers black women and the banking institutions and networks they built from the eve of the Civil War to the Great Depression. Her other publications include “‘To Do a Work that Would Be Very Far Reaching’: Minnie Geddings Cox, the Mississippi Life Insurance Company, and the Challenges of Black Women’s Business Leadership in the Early Twentieth-Century United States,” Enterprise and Society 17, No. 3 (September 2016): 473–514, DOI: 10.1017/eso.2015.66, and “‘The Hope of the South’: The New Century Cotton Mill of Dallas, Texas, and the Business of Race in the New South, 1902–1907,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 116, No. 2 (October 2012): 138–166.

Milorad M. Novicevic (PhD University of Oklahoma) is an associate professor of Management at the University of Mississippi. His research focuses on leadership in historical, educational and global contexts. He has published more than 150 articles in various peer-reviewed journals including the Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, Leadership, Human Relations, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Organization, Human Resource Management, Journal of World Business, and Journal of Business Ethics.

Ifeoluwa Tobi Popoola (PhD University of Mississippi) is an assistant professor of Management at the Walter F and Virginia Johnson School of Business, McMurry University. His main research interests include the examination of the role of accountability in entrepreneurship, leadership, ethics, management history, and employee (un)ethical behaviors. In 2015, he received the “SAGE Best Leadership Paper Award” at the Academy of Management (History Division). His additional scholarly contributions appear in academic journals such as Leadership, Journal of Management History, Journal of Education for Business, Journal of Management Education, and Management & Organizational History. He also has authored multiple literary contributions published in Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal.

John H Humphreys is a professor of Management and Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Texas A&M University – Commerce. His work has appeared in numerous venues including the Harvard Business Review, Human Relations, Leadership, Sloan Management Review, Organization, Business Horizons, Management Decision, Thunderbird International Business Review, Journal of Management Inquiry, Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, Management & Organizational History, and Journal of Management History.

Albert J Mills is a Professor of Management at Saint Mary’s University (Canada) and Professor of Innovative Management at the University of Eastern Finland. His research focusses on diversity, intersectionality, and historiography. He is the author/editor of 45 books and edited collections, including Insights and Research on the study of Gender and Intersectionality in International Airline Cultures (Emerald, 2017); The Routledge Companion to Management & Organizational History (2015); ‘ANTi-History: Theorizing the Past, History, and Historiography in Management and Organizational Studies,’ (IAP, 2012; and Sex, Strategy, and the Stratosphere: the Gendering of Airline Cultures (Palgrave McMillan, 2006).

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