Growing up in the heart of the Confederacy, Maggie Lena Walker started work as a laundress at age nine. At the urging of her mother and mentors, she turned to education, and used it to propel her life forward — graduating high school at 16, working as a teacher, and learning accounting.
Those experiences, coupled with her strong work ethic, culminated in Walker rising to lead the Independent Order of St. Luke and found several other businesses, all of which created jobs and opportunities for many women and Blacks people where there had been none before.
In this episode, Harvard Business School senior lecturer Tony Mayo traces Walker’s approach to leadership on her journey to becoming the first female bank president in America.
You’ll learn how she led the turnaround of the Order of St. Luke starting in 1899 by cutting costs, increasing membership, and launching new businesses that catered to unmet needs in Richmond’s Black community. You’ll also learn how Walker relied on her personal networks and deep local roots to overcome challenges rooted in systemic racism throughout her career.
Key episode topics include: leadership, managing people, entrepreneurship, race, gender, Independent Order of St. Luke.
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- Listen to the original Cold Call episode: Black Business Leaders Series: A Remarkable Legacy of Firsts, Maggie Lena Walker (2017)
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HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR on Leadership, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. What if I told you that in Richmond, Virginia, right after the American Civil War, a popular department store, a widely read newspaper, and a respected local bank were all run not by a corporation, but by a fraternal order? As the leader of the Independent Order of Saint Luke, an African-American fraternal order founded to promote Black economic independence, Maggie Lena Walker not only broke new ground for herself as a woman leader, she also created new professional opportunities for Black Americans in her community.
In this episode, Harvard Business School’s senior lecturer Tony Mayo traces Walker’s approach to leadership on her journey to becoming the first female bank president in America. You’ll learn how she led the turnaround of the Order of Saint Luke by cutting costs, increasing membership and launching new businesses that catered to unmet needs in Richmond’s African-American community. You’ll also learn how Walker relied on her personal networks and deep local roots to overcome challenges related to systemic racism throughout her leadership career. This episode originally aired on Cold Call in February 2017. Here it is.
BRIAN KENNY: Fraternal orders have been around since medieval times, and often they were the subject of suspicion and intrigue. In colonial America, they were incubators for revolution, democracy, science and religion. The Sons of Liberty, the Freemasons, the Ku Klux Klan, these were well-known, but there was also the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Molly Maguires and thousands of others that appeared and disappeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the golden age of fraternal orders.
At its peak of the 1920s, as much as 40% of the adult population held a membership in at least one fraternal order. Today, we’ll hear from Professor Tony Mayo about his case entitled, “Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke.” I’m your host, Brian Kenny and you’re listening to Cold Call.
SPEAKER 3: So, we are all sitting there in the classroom.
SPEAKER 4: Professor walks in.
SPEARKER 5: And they look up and you know it’s coming. Oh, the dreaded cold call.
BRIAN KENNY: Tony Mayo teaches MBA students and executives at Harvard Business School. He’s an expert on the subject of leadership and the director for the school’s leadership initiative. Tony, thanks for joining us today.
TONY MAYO: Thanks for having me.
BRIAN KENNY: I love the way the case began. It was with a quote by her. Can you sort of put us in that time and place?
TONY MAYO: Yeah. So, the quote is actually from 1901, and this is two years after Maggie Lena Walker has taken over the Independent Order of Saint Luke. She’d been involved in it since she was, oh, I don’t know, 14 years old, and now she’s in her early thirties. The organization is actually on the brink of collapse. Membership is down and she is trying to rally up the organization. She’s two years into a turnaround and her two years into the leadership, she’s actually tripled the membership. She’s created a juvenile division. She’s doubled the number of councils. So, she’s on this path of turning the organization around, building the growth, and she’s trying to get council members, fraternity members excited and motivated to continue this growth.
BRIAN KENNY: So, how did you find out about her? What prompted you to write this case?
TONY MAYO: So, the case actually comes from a lot of research that Nithinoria and I have done over the years looking at great business leaders. And so, about 10 or 12 years ago, we actually embarked on this notion of should there be a canon of business leadership? If you think about MBA students, they actually study the functions of business. Accounting and finance and marketing. But students of literature, they study the great writers and students of art, they study the great artists.
And we thought, well, what if we flipped that on its head and we treated an MBA like a liberal arts degree, if you will, and say, who would be in this canon of leadership? And so, that was the genesis of this research project that has lasted for over 15 years. We actually developed a database of 1,000 leaders and we wanted the database to be much broader than just Fortune 500 companies, much broader than public companies. People who broke the mold, people who actually were able to change the way in which people have lived and worked.
And so, the first book that we wrote was called In Their Time, and that really looked at contextual intelligence. We took these thousand leaders and we put them in the context of their time to try to understand what type of leadership was required for success. But then we had collected all this information about these leaders and we thought, is the Horatio Alger myth, is that true or is that a myth? This whole rags to riches story that anybody with determination and drive can actually succeed in the United States. So, when we looked at our database of 1,000, we saw that there were certain insiders and outsiders, certain people that had access to opportunity and people that didn’t have access to opportunity.
So, this particular case actually came out of looking at the outsiders. So, if you think about who was on the outside looking in in terms of access and opportunity throughout the 20th century, it was all people of color, it was women. And if you did create success, you often created success in your own environment, serving your own community, starting small. And so, we tried to get this sense of what is the path to power that insiders took and what was the path to power that outsiders took and what can we learn from that?
This particular case was actually a student project. So, one of my students, Shandy Smith, who had taken the Great Business Leaders course, we eventually created this big Great Business Leaders course. She wanted to write a story about an African-American woman in an industry that you don’t typically associate African-American women in. So, if you look at our database of great business leaders, every African-American woman on the list was either in personal healthcare or hair care similar to Madam C.J. Walker, or they were in fashion or something of that nature. Sort of women serving businesses for other women.
And so, this student of mine wanted to put a [inaudible 00:06:22] in a situation that would be quite unique for women. And as the first female bank president and first Black female bank president in the United States, she thought Maggie Lena Walker would be a great story.
BRIAN KENNY: She found a good one.
TONY MAYO: So, it was a great paper and ultimately became the basis for the case.
BRIAN KENNY: And it’s a great case. So, let’s talk a little bit about Maggie. She was born in, I think it was 1868,
TONY MAYO: ’67.
BRIAN KENNY: ’67.
TONY MAYO: Same as Madam C.J. Walker. Same year.
BRIAN KENNY: Oh, no kidding?
TONY MAYO: Yes. 1867.
BRIAN KENNY: So, tell us what was life like for her and for Black people in general at that time?
TONY MAYO: Yeah. So, she was born, and we have to put this in the context of where she was. So, she was born in the heart of the Confederacy in Richmond Virginia two years after the end of the Civil War. She was born to a free mother. So, her mother had been freed by the family that she’d worked for. The Van Lew family. She worked in it was like a hotel type of operation, but her father was actually a white Irish newspaper man who wrote for the New York Herald.
BRIAN KENNY: How common was that back then? Probably not very.
TONY MAYO: Not very common and it was certainly not common and not allowed for her to marry a white man, her mother to marry a white man. So, in fact, if you look at the laws of the state of Virginia, interracial marriage wasn’t allowed until 1967, a full 100 years later.
And it was actually not a bad life in terms of the context of Richmond. If you sort of think about what could happen and what most people faced because they had been freed earlier, her mother had been freed and her father had a stable job. She had a stable job. That was fine until Maggie Lena Walker was about nine years old, and then her father was mysteriously murdered. Well, they say it’s murder. I mean, it was never solved, but he left for work one day. He never came home.
And so, at that particular point, when Maggie’s nine years old, she has to go into business with her mother because they cannot survive. Her father was mostly the breadwinner. Her mother was doing laundry on the side. Maggie decides that she has to work with her mother, and so, she becomes a laundress or washerwoman.
BRIAN KENNY: At the age of nine.
TONY MAYO: At the age of nine, yes.
BRIAN KENNY: At some point, education becomes a very important part of her life.
TONY MAYO: Yeah.
BRIAN KENNY: What was the influence that education had? And actually I find it curious that the city of Richmond was progressive enough to recognize that they needed to educate this new upcoming generation of recently freed Black people or else their economy would not be able to support itself.
TONY MAYO: Yes. Yeah. So, Richmond was actually fairly progressive. In fact, they had the best schools in the South for both whites and Blacks for a number of years up until the turn of the 20th Century, and then things changed. So, it’s interesting, when you look at the first 10 years post Civil War, it was a period of reconstruction. And so, there was lots of opportunity. The 14th Amendment’s passed. The 15th Amendment passed granting citizenship, granting the right to vote for Black men. There’s opportunities for education.
And so, Maggie is growing up during this particular period of time, and even though her mother needs her help and needs the money from her laundry work says, look, you’re going to go to school. You’re going to get the education. And a new segregated school had just opened up in Richmond, Virginia, and she sent her to that particular school. And Maggie thrived in that school. She actually graduated high school when she was 16 years old. And at that time, she was asked to then become a teacher as well, which was one of the few professions that were open to women at the particular period of time.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And this is about the time also where Saint Luke’s becomes an important aspect of her life.
TONY MAYO: Yeah. So, she joined the First African Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia when she was about 11 years old. And that was a fairly progressive church at the time. It allowed both white and Black parishioners to be part of the church. That actually changed after there was a big backlash against reconstruction after 1877. And then there was this whole notion of separate but equal and the whites actually left the church. And so, by the time she joins the church, it’s a Black church that’s Black run, and there’s a Black pastor, and that’s a formidable experience in her life.
And when she’s 14 years old, she’s encouraged by her Sunday school teacher, her mother and the pastor of the church, who are the three key influences in our life to say, hey, you should join this Independent Order of the Sons and Daughters of Saint Luke. It was also one of the few fraternal organizations that allowed both men and women or boys and girls to join.
BRIAN KENNY: Most were all male.
TONY MAYO: Most were all male. Yeah. And so, she decides to join that with the explicit mission that they’re going to do community service, do projects. From a juvenile division perspective, that was the work was to help in the community. The broader mission was really to provide death benefits and to provide healthcare benefits to the Black community. There was no other services. No other insurance companies, no white owned insurance companies, no other fraternal organizations would provide those services. And so, you saw this huge growth of fraternal organizations designed principally to focus on insurance.
And that actually goes back to the Great Business Leaders database that Nithinoria and I had worked on. The second-largest business actually for African-Americans is insurance and finance. It was mostly focused on creating this opportunity to have a decent burial and to have some semblance of healthcare in an emergency.
BRIAN KENNY: And this is where some of her leadership skills st