Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism) by Shennette Garrett-Scott

1
“I Am Yet Waitin”
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN AND FREE LABOR 
BANKING EXPERIMENTS IN THE 
EMANCIPATION- ERA SOUTH, 1860s– 1900
“I am yet waitin.” Matilda Scott’s crude handwriting rose off the page, 
more an accusation than an observation. By 1920, Scott felt frustrated 
inquiring about the eighteen- dollar refund from her mother’s Freedman’s 
Bank account. As commissioner of the defunct Freedman’s Savings and 
Trust Company, John Skelton Williams had received hundreds— probably 
thousands— of letters like hers during his six years in the position. His 
main responsibility as commissioner was to help depositors recover some 
of their money. When the Freedman’s Bank shut its doors in 1874, tens of 
thousands of African Americans lost an accumulated wealth of more 
than $63 million (in 2017 dollars). One of them was Adaline Washing-

ton, Matilda Scott’s mother. A former slave, Adaline did not know her 
age, could neither read nor write, and mentioned no husband, dead or 
alive, when she opened her account in the fall of 1872 at the Freedman’s 
Bank branch in Shreveport, Louisiana. She lived about a mile outside 
the city with her six children. Young Matilda helped her mother with the 
children and her farming work, so much so that Adaline instructed the bank 
clerk that Matilda could make deposits in and withdrawals from the 
account. Nearly fifty years later, Adaline’s daughter continued to speak 
for her mother. She pressed Commissioner Williams, wanting to know 

“hoo you paid my money too.” An insistent Scott ended her note not 
with a request but a demand: “Anser at once.”1
Scott felt emboldened to make demands rather than requests but not 
because the amount her mother left was significant. Scott belonged to a 
generation of African American women who had lived with both slavery 
and emancipation but sometimes questioned the essential differences 
between the two. They had grown accustomed to fighting: fighting dis-

honest planters, marauding vigilantes, and tightfisted bureaucrats in 
their efforts to provide for their families. Black women’s insistent claims 
for economic independence fulfilled bureaucrats’, reformers’, and philan-

thropists’ expectations that black women be prudent with money, but 
these women did not intend to rely on compliant, meek, and dependent 
behavior to achieve financial self- sufficiency.
This chapter explores how the transformation from slavery to free labor 
from just after the Civil War until the end of the nineteenth century influ-

enced the various strategies that black women pursued and contested in their 
search for economic security. The iteration of free labor promoted by north-

ern military officers, philanthropists, and politicians extolled the pay slip 
and passbook as the truest tests of blacks’ capacity for citizenship. The “free” 
in free labor did not mean the opposite of slavery— nor did it mean that 
blacks were, as Willie Lee Rose notes, “free to do just as they pleased.”
 Black 
labor remained essential to revitalizing the southern economy and maintain-

ing the United States’ predominance in the global economy, but these offi-

cers, philanthropists, and politicians seldom described free labor in such 
crass, free- market terms. They preferred to imagine that they were offering 
blacks a path to citizenship through economic responsibility by promoting 
approaches that combined some form of paid wage labor with various money 
management and savings schemes. The key economic experiments included 
the Freedmen’s Fund, free labor and military savings banks, and the cap-

stone institution: the Freedman’s Bank.
These experiments, however, preserved an ideological commitment to 
black subservience, leaving most blacks economically vulnerable and with 
little in the way of civic or political rights. The Freedmen’s Fund collected 
the wages of black workers, and military officials maintained control over 
that money— undermining the very lessons of self- sufficiency that the fund 

Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism) by Shennette Garrett-Scott