Every once in awhile I visit a place and something (or someone) hits me over the head so fiercely that I am called to tell a story.
That is just what meeting Maggie Lena Walker did to me.
On my first day in Richmond Virginia my fellow travel writers and myself were walking back to our Airbnb on Clay Street in the Jackson Ward neighborhood of Richmond Virginia. We came across a square with a huge statue of a woman towering towards the sky with an air of significance.
I would come to find out significant is a mild term to describe Maggie.
I pulled out my phone to take 2- 5 second clips of video I would later share to Tiktok. As I was filming the inlay on the ground, these words appeared on my screen. Teacher, Business Woman, Newspaper Publisher, Civil Rights Leader, Entrepreneur, and Mother, clearly describing all the things Maggie Walker was.
Wow, the woman was certainly a force. And I had to know more.
And thus started my interest in sharing Maggie’s story which would become a focus of my time spent in Richmond.
I have never been to Richmond. I knew the historical significance of the city was one I was interested in as a woman born and raised in the north. Richmond was the epicenter of the Confederacy, and I wanted to learn more about its heartbeat. Good and bad, its shaped who we are as a country today. I may cringe at its past, and that is why when I was introduced to Maggie Walker, it was her I wanted to honor. A black woman rising to the top. Breaking boundaries and making a name for herself. Not only as a woman, but as a Black woman. Don’t we all have something to learn from her.
You cannot help but find Maggie all over Jackson Ward. Not only is her statue commemorating her here, but this is her home turf. You can find her home the Maggie Lena Walker National Historical Site a few blocks away (more about that later). The bank she was president of nearby, as well buildings that housed her newspaper and department store.
So Who Was She, Really?
Maggie was born Maggie Lena Mitchell on July 15, 1864, right there in Richmond — to a formerly enslaved mother, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Draper, who supported the family working as a laundress. Her father is believed by most historians to have been Eccles Cuthbert, a White, Irish-born Confederate soldier who wasn’t part of her upbringing. Either way, Maggie grew up poor and Black in the literal capital of the Confederacy, which, if you think about it, makes everything that came after even more staggering.
She used to say it herself: she wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth — she was born with a laundry basket practically on her head. And she meant it literally. As a kid, she helped her mom deliver other people’s clean laundry around town.
Here’s the thing about Maggie, though — she was sharp. She graduated from the segregated Richmond Colored Normal School in 1883 and started teaching. But back then, married women weren’t allowed to teach, so when she married Armstead Walker, a brick mason who built much of the buildings in Jackson Ward, in 1886, she had to walk away from the classroom.
That could’ve been the end of the story. Instead, it was the beginning.
At just 14, Maggie had already joined the Independent Order of St. Luke, a Black mutual aid society that helped members with everything from sick care to burial costs. With teaching off the table, she threw herself into the Order full-time, climbing the ranks until, in 1899, she became its Right Worthy Grand Secretary; basically, its CEO. The organization was in serious financial trouble when she took over, down to something like $31 in the treasury and a stack of unpaid bills. She turned it around, growing its membership into the tens of thousands across multiple states.
And then, because apparently running a fraternal order wasn’t enough, she looked around Jackson Ward and decided the community needed a bank, a newspaper, and a department store. So she built all three.
Let’s Get Back To Her Historical Site
Remember how I said “more about that later”? I ended up making four visits to the Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site over the course of my time in Richmond. Four. Okay, maybe I became a little obsessed.
By visit three, the rangers on duty knew me by name and threatened to put me to work. Not in a “oh, that lady again” side-eye kind of way, but in a genuinely delighted, “back again?” kind of way, like I’d become a regular at the world’s best coffee shop, except the coffee shop was a National Park Service site and the thing I kept coming back for was Maggie.
I toured her house, the one on what used to be called Quality Row, the one she and Armstead expanded into a home for their sprawling extended family, twice. Unfortunately, I never could go upstairs, it was closed off during my visit due to the excessive heat during my stay.
Here’s what I did see, and honestly, it was plenty.
You start in the parlor, the room where Maggie received the neighborhood’s most distinguished guests, because of course a woman running a bank, a newspaper, and a fraternal order needed a proper room for that. There’s a replica of a chair made specially for her in her later years, on wheels, with a desk attached, and standing in front of it, you get it: this wasn’t a woman who slowed down quietly. Even her furniture had to accommodate a life still in motion.
Then the dining room, which might be my favorite room in the house, because it’s not just where the Walkers ate dinner, it’s where the plans got made. I like to imagine the conversations that happened around that table. How do we get more Black-owned businesses on this block? How do we keep our people safe, employed, banked, housed? I’d bet good money that at least one of those dinners is where the idea of boycotting the trolleys came up.
And okay, let’s talk about the trolleys, because I love this story so much I have to share it. In 1904, Virginia passed a law letting streetcar companies segregate seating, and the Virginia Passenger and Power Company jumped at the chance to do it in Richmond. Maggie, along with Richmond Planet editor John Mitchell Jr., told the Black community to do something deceptively simple: walk. Just stop riding the cars. No violence, no confrontation, just stop giving them your money. Nearly 90 percent of Black Richmonders chose to walk rather than ride, and they kept it up for months. By that July, the streetcar company filed for bankruptcy, and by December it had been sold off at auction.
Let that sink in: a bunch of everyday people, walking instead of riding, put an entire company out of business. Decades before Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on that bus in Montgomery. Richmond had already shown it could be done.
Past the dining room and kitchen is the laundry room, a full-circle kind of detail, given that Maggie’s own mother made her living doing laundry for other people. And out back, an addition her sons built as their own hangout space, basically a 1900s man cave, where they entertained their friends.
But the detail that got me the most was the hand-pulley elevator. In her later years, after illness took her mobility, this is what carried her up to her bedroom every single night pulled by her chauffeur Alphonso’s hand, not a motor. No dramatic ramps or grand accommodations. Just a simple mechanism that let her keep living in the home she built, on her own terms, for as long as she possibly could.
And then the walls. Diplomas. Newspaper clippings of guests who’d passed through her home, Booker T. Washington among them, along with other giants of the era’s fight for Black equality. Proof, if you needed any, that this house on Leigh Street wasn’t just a home. It was a hub. And an opulent one at that.
This was home to four generations of the Walker family. Twelve people. Maggie clearly wanted her family to surround her until her death in 1934.
The Bank and the Newspaper
Down the street from the house, Maggie’s other ventures come into view. Pieces of the empire that made her a household name in Jackson Ward, and eventually, the whole country.
The newspaper came first. In 1902, Maggie launched The St. Luke Herald, and she stayed its editor for the next three decades. It wasn’t just Order business. The very first issue took on Jim Crow laws and segregated schools head-on, and by the late 1920s, it had become the most-read Black newspaper in Richmond.
Then came the bank. When the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank opened in November 1903, Maggie became the first Black woman in the country to charter and run a bank. Not just the first Black woman, the first woman of any race. On opening day, customers lined up and deposited over $8,000, in amounts ranging from 31 cents to over a hundred dollars, and nobody was turned away at that teller window. She kept loan amounts small and down payments low, specifically so regular working people, not just the wealthy, could get a mortgage or start a business. She ran that bank for nearly 30 years. When the Great Depression came for everyone else, she merged it with two others to keep it alive. It’s still operating in some form today, one of the oldest Black-owned banks in the country.
The Emporium
Now. The Emporium.
This is the one that got me, because it’s the story of Maggie at her most ambitious, but the one time her ambition ran headlong into something even she couldn’t out-hustle.
In April 1905, twenty-two women from the Order of St. Luke opened the St. Luke Emporium. The department store was located right on Broad Street, which was and still is today Richmond’s main commercial strip. Broad Street served as the line that divided the city’s Black and White business districts. Maggie put it there on purpose. Black shoppers at the time technically could shop on Broad Street, but they couldn’t use the front door or try on clothes at most stores. At the Emporium, they could do both. The mannequins in the window even had skin tones that matched the customers walking by, a small detail, but an intentional one. The store was staffed almost entirely by Black women, giving them respectable retail jobs at a time when domestic work or factory labor were about the only options available to them.
And Maggie didn’t mince words about why it mattered. She told her community, flat out, that shopping in White-owned stores only fed what she called “the lion of prejudice” — and that the only way to weaken that lion was to stop feeding it.
But here’s the part that still makes me a little angry on her behalf: the White business community saw exactly what she was doing, and they came after it hard. A Retail Dealers’ Association formed specifically to shut the Emporium down. They pressured wholesalers not to sell goods to the store at all. When that didn’t fully work, some wholesalers agreed to supply the Emporium but demanded cash up front, refusing the 60-day credit terms White-owned stores got automatically. Meanwhile, some Black shoppers kept right on shopping at the old White-owned stores anyway, whether out of habit, or real fear of what might happen if they didn’t.
It was a fight on two fronts, and even Maggie Walker couldn’t win it. The Emporium held on for about six years before it closed for good in early 1912.
It’s the one real defeat in an otherwise unbroken run of wins. And honestly? I think that’s part of why it stuck with me more than the bank did. The bank succeeded, and it’s easy to celebrate a success. The Emporium is a reminder of just how coordinated and relentless the resistance to Black economic progress was. That even a woman as brilliant, connected, and determined as Maggie Walker could build something extraordinary and still watch outside forces grind it down.
What We Owe Her
So here’s where I land, weeks and multiple visits later.
Maggie Walker didn’t just survive Jim Crow Richmond, she out-organized it, out-built it, and out-lasted most of the people who tried to stop her. She gave Black women in her community jobs behind teller windows and sales counters instead of only in someone else’s kitchen. She gave children coin banks and taught them to save before they could even spell “compound interest.” She got an entire city to walk instead of ride, and watched the company that wronged them go bankrupt because of it. And when one of her ventures failed, she kept going anyway, because the mission was always bigger than any single win or loss.
I came to Richmond as a woman from the North, ready to reckon a little with a city built as the heart of the Confederacy. I left obsessed with a woman who spent her entire life making sure that history didn’t get the last word.
I am still puzzled, even weeks later, why I instantly took to Maggie Walker that hot day in Richmond. Maybe it was the vibe I got from walking the same streets she did all those years ago. Perhaps it was the towering tribute to a woman who defined all odds and became a leader in her community. Whatever it was, I am a richer woman for getting to know Maggie Walker.
So, my fellow solo wanderers, here’s my ask: put Richmond on your list, and put Maggie at the top of your itinerary. Jackson Ward is easy to explore on foot, it’s a short walk from the statue to her house on Leigh Street, and the neighborhood is full of Black-owned restaurants and coffee shops that would make Maggie proud of what her city became. You don’t need a companion to appreciate this one. If anything, going alone means you can linger as long as you want in that dining room, or circle the statue for a fifth video clip without anyone rushing you back to the car.
One more reason to add it to the list: the Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site is run by the National Park Service, which means if you’re one of those people (hi, hello, it’s me) who carries a National Parks passport book around in your bag, this stop counts. Get your cancellation stamp at the visitor center (along with other items) and add Maggie to your collection, right alongside the canyons and coastlines. She earned her place there just as much as any of them did.
Oh and by the way, did I mention the site is FREE!! Go to the website for visitor details.
And if the rangers start to recognize your face after visit number two? Don’t worry about it. Just tell them Lori sent you. Some obsessions, and some solo trips, are worth repeating.
