Champion of the Black Community Is Given Her Rightful Due in Richmond

In Richmond, Virginia, a city full of monuments to Confederate leaders, a statue was erected on Saturday to Maggie Lena Walker, the daughter of a formerly enslaved cook, who became a champion of the black community in the early 20th century, and was, notably, the first woman to charter a bank in the United States.

“She is in her rightful place in the heart of this city,” Liza Mickens, Walker's great-great-granddaughter, tells Vanessa Remmers of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

The 10-foot-tall statue stands near Richmond's Jackson Ward neighborhood, once a thriving center of African-American business culture that was often referred to as the "Harlem of the South." Much of that thriving growth was due to Walker, who chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in 1903 in the neighborhood to provide the loans and economic assistance to African-Americans when other banks wouldn't.