Making Black Power Pay: Black Banking in Philadelphia, 1900 - 1930

Making Black Power Pay: Black Banking in Philadelphia 1900 – 1930 examines Black efforts to create community and self-sufficiency through finance in early twentieth century Philadelphia. It argues that Black Philadelphians utilized Black economic nationalism, the process of retaining and circulating the Black dollar within the Black community for the benefit of Black people, to challenge the Jim Crow system of discrimination and craft safter self-sustaining communities. They did this through the development of financial institutions which drew on local resources and redistributed wealth through lending. This process required the organizing and economic work of Black men and women which is termed inter-gender mutualism. Inter-gender mutualism refers to the way Black men and women pooled their political, social, and economic resources to work toward the common goal of community building. Furthermore, it asserts that financial community building in Philadelphia required inter-gender cooperation at the organizing, operational, and investment level to be successful. This dissertation uncovered that Black Philadelphians utilized Black business and banking to offer housing and employment opportunities to Black people to create safe spaces from the growing enactment of social, political, and legal acts of discrimination collectively termed Jim Crow. As these Black institutions became successful the community funneled their newly acquired collective power to expand safe economic and social spaces and challenge political discrimination in Pennsylvania.