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Maggie L. Walker - Wikipedia
Maggie Lena Walker (July 15, 1864 – December 15, 1934) was an African-American businesswoman and teacher. Walker was the first African-American woman to charter a bank and serve as its president in the United States (The first American woman known to have served as a bank president was Louise M. Weiser, of Vermont, in 1875. The first American woman documented to have both chartered a bank and served as its president was New Hampshire's Deborah Powers in 1877. In 1903, Maggie L. Walker became both the first African American woman to charter a bank, and the first African American woman to serve as a bank president). As a leader, Walker achieved successes with the vision to make tangible improvements in the way of life for African Americans. Disabled by paralysis and a wheelchair user later in life, Walker also became an example for people with disabilities. Walker's restored and furnished home in the historic Jackson Ward neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia has been designated a National Historic Site, operated by the National Park Service.
According to biographical material she supplied, Walker was born as Maggie Lena Draper in Richmond, Virginia, to Eccles Cuthbert and Elizabeth Draper two years and two months after the end of the American Civil War. Census information, as well as a diary passage saying that she was four years old on her mother's wedding in May 1868, with William Mitchell, set the date back to 1864 or 1865. Her mother was a former slave and an assistant cook in the Church Hill mansion of Elizabeth Van Lew, who had been a spy in the Confederate capital city of Richmond for the Union during the War, and was later postmaster for Richmond. Her stepfather was a butler and her biological father was an Irish-born Confederate soldier and a postwar writer for the New York Herald.
The Mitchell family moved to their own home on College Alley off of Broad Street nearby Miss Van Lew's home where Maggie and her brother Johnnie were raised. The house was near the First African Baptist Church which, like many black churches at the time, was an economic, political, and social center for the local black community. After the untimely death of William Mitchell, Maggie's mother supported her family by working as a laundress. Young Maggie attended the newly formed Richmond Public Schools and helped her mother by delivering the clean clothes.
Saturday, February 20th 2021 at 9:08PM
Deacon Ron Gray
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Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman
Activist
Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
"I could have freed so many more: If only they knew they were slaves -- HARRIET TUBMAN"
Saturday, February 20th 2021 at 9:16PM
Deacon Ron Gray
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