Hip Hop Caucus To Host Virtual Black Banking Panel This Week

The virtual event will attempt to marry the history of Black banking in America with the modern struggle for climate, racial, and economic justice.

Back in March 2024, the Hip Hop Caucus launched its Black and Green Campaign, a multi-year economic and environmental justice effort aimed at disempowering mass incarceration and systemic environmental racism. Part of that aim was a focus on Black banks, and on Feb. 19, the group will continue that work through a virtual event titled (the) History of Black Banking: From Reconstruction To Modern Financial Activism.

The virtual event, which begins streaming at 6 p.m. EST, will attempt to marry the history of Black banking in America with the modern struggle for climate, racial, and economic justice.

According to Let Us Put Our Money Together: The Founding of America’s Black Banks, the history of Black banking stretches back as far as 1833, if not earlier. It began informally when some successful Black entrepreneurs, particularly New Orleans in the South, began offering rudimentary financial services.

This book, which Tim Todd published in 2019 with the assistance of the Public Affairs Department of The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, traces the origins of the first true Black banking apparatuses and arguably the first step toward Black banks in America, started in most cases by the formerly enslaved.

As it relates to the event which Hip Hop Caucus is putting on, there will be a virtual panel discussion featuring Dr. Shennette Garrett-Scott, national director of the Association of Black Women Historians and the author of Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal; Dr. Brandon Winford, an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, as well as the author of John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle; and Kenya Tyson, executive director of the Black Massacre Project, an independent public research center that explores the historical race massacres perpetrated against Black Americans.

The panel discussion will discuss some of the early Black financial pioneers in America and how their work paved the way for the Hip Hop Caucus’ Bank Black & Green Campaign.

According to the announcement, “Attendees will gain insights into modern MDI/CDFI challenges, explore innovative campaigning strategies, and engage in a critical dialogue on reinvestment into our communities.”