“I Am Yet Waitin’”: African American Women and the Freedman’s Bank

The experience of black women challenges the notion capitalism rests on a foundation of individual liberty. This paper considers free and enslaved black women’s formal and informal economic activities as private lenders, investors, and speculators. The physical and reproductive labor of enslaved black women represented an engine of wealth. In addition, their bodies were chattel insured, risked, and traded by others. Under threat of reenslavement, many states taxed and policed free black women. Authorities demanded they contribute to their families’ upkeep.

Yet black women actively participated in what might be called personal finance. They saved, borrowed, loaned, and invested money; financed property; and sought and extended credit. This paper explores how race and gender constricted and expanded black women’s ability to build wealth. Legal proscriptions such as coverture were not as serious an issue as were patchworks of local and state laws designed to undermine blacks’ civil rights and economic autonomy. During the era of emancipation, the Refugee and Freedmen’s Fund and later the Freedmen’s Bank represented a federal version of economic exploitation and racial and sexual paternalism that undermined much of the economic autonomy free black women created before the war and that former enslaved women struggled to carve out after. Early black banks represented continued challenges and opportunities for black women. Using archival sources such as manuscripts, account ledgers, and letters, this paper explores the ramifications of race and gender in nineteenth-century U.S. capitalism and black women’s quest for economic parity and justice.