President Abraham Lincoln, one of the nation’s original visionaries, had wanted to win the Civil War but also envisioned freeing the enslaved and ensuring their economic prosperity. After he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he signed legislation creating the Freedman’s Saving and Trust Co., known as Freedman’s Savings Bank.
Lincoln considered the bank’s mission so important to the nation that its offices were located directly across from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where the president could see it and keep his eye on it. The bank’s mission was radical: Teach newly freed blacks about money.
Additionally, during the final period of the Civil War, one of Lincoln’s top generals promised all freed slaves 40 acres and a mule, an opportunity to own collateral and machinery in their own names. Lincoln supported the initiative.
Unfortunately, Lincoln was assassinated. His successor, President Andrew Johnson, was diametrically opposed to things like the Freedman’s Savings Bank. “As long as I am president, this nation will be white-run,” Johnson was quoted as saying. So much for Lincoln’s black empowerment ideas.
Still, at its height, the Freedman’s Savings Bank had 70,000 depositors, all formerly enslaved. By placing all of the little they had in this new federal bank, these people were making the most powerful aspirational statement possible. They wanted to back their own lives, and they hoped to contribute to the American experiment, no matter how they were treated.
The black middle class didn’t emerge until nearly a century later, following World War II, when black workers finally got new access to government jobs and careers. Yet today, we have an entire group of people — more than 30 million African-Americans — who have never been given a lesson in the global language of money or how capitalism works. They have not been given financial literacy. They were never given what I call The Memo.
These people are not stupid; they are simply limited in their financial literacy. Today, the net worth of middle-class blacks is a fraction of the net worth of their white counterparts, who have simply had better financial and economic role models for a much longer time. They have experienced embedded lessons in financial literacy, free enterprise and capitalism as the world practices it. When you know better, you tend to do better.
I founded Operation HOPE more than 20 years ago to address the 100 million Americans who make $50,000 or less, who define themselves as the working poor or the under-served. Today, this also includes the struggling middle class. These people, families, small businesses and communities need to speak the language of financial literacy to help turn their situation around.
In Atlanta, we’ve done things both right and not right. We’re the home of the most African-American small businesses in the country, and that’s a good thing. They’ve created jobs, paid taxes and helped to grow a sustainable city. But we are also home to the fifth most-unbanked region in the country, Vine City, whose residents have credit scores as low as 250.
Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young had it right when he said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement succeeded in integrating cities and America, but failed to integrate the money. In fairness, you can’t really “integrate” money. But we can deliver The Memo, to show a new generation how to access it, own it, grow it and keep it.
It’s time to finish what Lincoln started and Dr. King never had the opportunity to meaningfully address. This time, we can and will use the power of the private sector and the free enterprise system, supported strongly by government, to transform people’s lives. We must enable people to contribute to the American dream and to help America win again, with all of its people’s shoulders against the wheel of change.
John Hope Bryant is founder and CEO of Operation Hope, a nonprofit social investment banking organization.
