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

(Howard University Press, $36.95) by Gertrude Woodruff Marlowe is a thoroughly researched and documented biography of the life and times of Maggie Lena Walker, the first Black woman to head a bank. She was the consummate "race woman" who was renowned as one of the most highly paid and wealthiest Black women of her time.

Her biographer writes, "Neither the term cultural heroine nor charismatic leader, although accurate descriptions and suggestive of certain aspects of Walker's persona, seems adequate to comprehend her popularity." Her biographer documents her public accomplishments but also chronicles her personal grief and private pain, including a miscarriage, chronic nerve and tendon damage in her knees, earning her the nickname, "the Lame Lioness," and the scandal in the Walker household in 1915 over the death of Walker's husband, accidentally shot and killed by the couple's eldest son. Despite these and other hardships, she remained publicly optimistic, telling her followers from her deathbed to "have faith, have hope, have courage, and carry on."

COPYRIGHT 2004 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group