A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment

Black Issues Book Review, July-August, 2004 by Janus Adams

A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment by Gertrude Woodruff Marlowe Howard University Press, October 2003 $24.95, ISBN 0-882-58211-9

If ever there was ever a subject crying out "remember me" it is Maggie Lena Walker. Unfortunately, this is not the biography Walker deserves. Walker, born to an ex-slave mother and white father, became one of this nation's wealthiest self made women and the first to charter a bank. All this, as the walls of Jim Crow went up and the hopes of former slaves came tumbling down.

How could a biographer not note the irony of May 18, 1896--charter date of the organization Walker would later lead to her renown, the Right Worthy Grand Council of the Independent Order of the Sons and Daughters of St. Luke? That same day, the Supreme Court handed down its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision, a transportation case, that legalized "separate but equal" segregation.

Segregated travel certainly affected this woman who built her organization blazing trails south to north. Similar forces would lead her peer-pioneer and near-namesake, Mme. C. J. Walker--America's first self-made woman millionaire--to lease a private railroad car and purchase her own automobile.

Marlowe offers a portrait with no backdrop. The author gives Mme. Walker's contemporaneous life only one line. This lapse is telling. In two paragraphs, the woman born Maggie Lena Mitchell goes flora public-school teacher to Mrs. Armstead Walker Jr., suffering the loss of her second child. Historic forces that should reveal character and the magnitude of Walker's against-the-odds achievement are chronicled in a dry, introductory tome.

By any measure, Maggie Lena Walker was a giant in her day and remains a legend in ours. She deserves tribute, and we deserve to know how she made her mark that future generations might follow her lead to the greater good.

--Reviewed by Janus Adams Janus Adams is author of Sister Days: 365 Inspired Moments in African American History (John Wiley & Sons, November 2000) and publisher of BackPax children's media.