Authors: Arnold Rampersad
In 1964, Jack’s most ambitious project was the development of a bank located in Harlem, and owned mainly by blacks, to serve the community there. This project was first the dream of Dunbar McLaurin, a Harlem businessman with a good knowledge of finance, who knew that the name Jackie Robinson would open many doors otherwise closed to him. Slowly Jack came around to accepting the challenge. The need for such a bank was real. In 1963, black Americans had a commanding stake in only thirteen banks and thirty-four federally insured savings and loan associations nationally. The assets of the average black bank came to just under $6 million; the national average was over $25 million. In Harlem, Carver Federal Savings and Loan Association was flourishing, but full-service banking was provided only by branches of banks with centers outside the community. Historically, banking and Jim Crow went hand in hand. “
When it came to mortgages to buy homes,” Jack would write, or “business loans to enable blacks to become entrepreneurs, blacks were discriminated against. Yet they faithfully and religiously deposited their savings in white banks.”
In 1963, Robinson and McLaurin, working closely with one of the black community’s most honored lawyers, Samuel Pierce, a Cornell University graduate and former judge and now an associate in the midtown law firm of Battle, Fowler, Stokes and Kheel, began to move in earnest. Putting together an organizing committee, they included three whites: Frank
Schiffman of the Apollo Theater; Jack Blumstein of Blumstein’s department store, another fixture on 125th Street; and Irving B. Altman, a retired banker slated to be the chief administrative officer. The committee also included Herbert Evans of the Housing and Redevelopment Board of the City of New York, who would supply expertise about housing and mortgages, and Alvin C. Hudgins, whose father, William Hudgins, was chairman of the board of Carver Federal Savings and Loan and a close friend of Jack’s. Later, three other members would be added: William Hudgins himself; Lloyd Dickens, a New York State assemblyman; and Rose Morgan, whose nationally organized Rose-Meta System of Beauty had made her perhaps the best-known woman entrepreneur in Harlem.
With Robinson and McLaurin as co-chairs of the committee, the project moved ahead smoothly in 1963. A site was found: offices on 125th Street about to be vacated by another bank, which was relocating. In September, James Saxon, the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal authority who regulated most banks in the nation, gave approval to Jack’s group to proceed with their plans. Robinson was now designated chairman of the board. In that capacity, he oversaw the offering of sixty thousand shares of common stock for sale at twenty-five dollars a share. By agreement, this offering was aimed at the larger Harlem community; to encourage democracy, each individual could buy a total of only one thousand shares and the committee itself would own only twenty percent of the offering. Robinson’s offering letter appealed frankly to Harlem’s pride; the new bank would be “
a community enterprise which will in every way belong to the people it is to serve.”
To Jack’s surprise and disappointment, selling stock proved a tough task in Harlem, where money was scarce and many people were wary of ambitious ventures. Worse, a clash of personalities soon threatened to abort the project. Dunbar McLaurin, who was expected to serve as president, had begun to act in ways that Robinson found dictatorial and self-serving. Proclaiming his “proprietorial” interest in the enterprise and scorning questions about his expenses, McLaurin demanded the loyalty of any organizer who hoped to serve as a director. When Jack offered to withdraw from the project, “
I had hardly got my words out of my mouth,” he later wrote, “when McLaurin produced resignation papers for me, already drawn up, indicating my withdrawal from the organizing committee and the proposed board of the bank.” But other organizers prevailed on Robinson not to resign. The matter was then referred to Saxon, the Comptroller of the Currency. In December, after a meeting in Washington, Saxon ruled against McLaurin on every major point; in fact, the project could not proceed with him as president.
Having briefly appeared to accept this ruling, McLaurin then challenged it. Withholding important documents in his possession, he also exploited the primal fears of black Harlem concerning white power and black subservience. According to an affidavit filed by Samuel Pierce in federal court, McLaurin “
issued press releases to Negro newspapers stating that white people had taken over the Bank. He made statements in the Harlem
community to the effect that the three white members of the Organizing Committee had been allowed to take control of the Bank, which was untrue.” The three whites on the committee, Pierce asserted, were not dominating the proceedings. “The only real struggle was the one Mr. McLaurin created between himself and the other Organizers.”
Despite these setbacks, and benefiting from two ninety-day extensions from the Comptroller, the sale of stock went on. About six hundred investors had bought shares, but about one-third of the offering remained unsold when seven members of the committee, including Robinson, stepped in to purchase the remaining shares at a cost of about $500,000. At least on paper, the bank project had reached its goal of capitalization at $1.5 million. On March 10, 1964, the Comptroller declared Freedom National Bank of New York a corporate entity. But the internal struggle was not over. Two days later, leading a dozen disruptive supporters into a meeting attended by three of the organizers (Jack was not present), McLaurin proceeded to “appoint” his supporters to the board, which then “elected” him president. While confusion reigned, someone changed the locks on the main office door.
The next day, the original committee met and expelled McLaurin. But he was not done fighting. Now, the committee had to weather a lawsuit filed against it in the United States District Court for Southern New York aimed at restraining its activities. However, on April 15, stockholders met and elected ten directors of Freedom National Bank. Bill Hudgins was now president of the bank; Robinson was confirmed as chairman of the board.
Confidently, Jack announced that the new bank would open “
on schedule, probably June 1.” In fact, it would not open for business until noon on December 18. As the operation settled in, a stream of curious visitors, including many of its now twelve hundred stockholders and its hundred-member advisory board, quickly deposited about $400,000. Three weeks later, on January 4, 1965, Freedom National Bank was officially dedicated when Alex Quaison-Sackey, the first African president of the United Nations General Assembly, cut a gold ribbon across the doorway of its offices at 275 West 125th Street. Among a flood of telegrams of congratulations was one from Vice-President-elect Hubert H. Humphrey to “
my good friend, Jackie Robinson.” Humphrey hailed the bank as “a symbol of the advances” of black Americans.
For an elated Robinson, this bank was merely a start. “
In my humble opinion,” he declared, “Freedom National is not just another local bank. It is symbolic of the determination of the Negro to become an integral part of the mainstream of our American economy.” If Freedom National succeeded, other banks would rise elsewhere—“banks which are color blind and banks which have as resources, not only their reserve funds, but also the
support of the masses of the Negro people.” And with Bill Hudgins working tirelessly to promote it, the bank flourished. Aided by cash deposits from a variety of individuals and organizations—from Martin Luther King Jr., who deposited his Nobel Prize check there, to labor unions, state and city bodies, and the Ford Foundation—its assets jumped to $2 million by mid-March, $5 million by May, and almost $10 million on its first anniversary in 1966. Five years after opening, it was the top black bank in the nation even as Robinson appealed publicly “
for more cash to aid the growing need for rehabilitation of the black community.”
As chairman of the board, Jack was no figurehead. “
I have been getting myself a real business education,” he wrote privately just as the bank opened. “The years I had with ‘Chock’ seem to have stood me in good stead. I am pretty much able to hold my own in our meetings. I still need some help on parliamentary procedure but I’ll overcome that.” He now pressed forward with more confidence into other business ventures. One of these was housing. After almost a decade as a front man here, Robinson had little to show for his pains; but he had renewed his efforts. In 1963, he finally had a measure of success, in a joint venture with his friend Floyd Patterson. In May, at a press conference at Mama Leone’s restaurant in Manhattan, the men announced the founding of a company to build low-income housing in integrated communities. Already their company held title to about 130 acres of land upstate, near the town of Wurtsboro in Sullivan County; with about $250,000 already invested, the first group of homes was now being built. “We believe,” Jack declared, “
that the building of homes in integrated communities can be profitable for the community, for the buyer, for our country and for one another. We intend to prove this.”
Robinson was right about the need for such housing. In October, when the first five model homes were opened to the public, visitors overran the site. But for reasons that are unclear, this project soon lost its luster; the Robinson-Patterson venture into housing quietly folded. Jack began to look overseas, and especially in the Caribbean, for sites. Over the following years, on visits to Puerto Rico and Jamaica, he would hold talks with local officials about building low-income housing there. Puerto Rico quickly proved impossible to crack; in 1963, Governor Luis Muñoz Marín respectfully turned down as far too expensive Jack’s proposals to build some units there. In Jamaica, where he had the ear of Hugh Shearer, who later became prime minister, Robinson and his partners made some progress; but this project, too, went nowhere.
Another major venture, but one that ended more painfully for Jack, was into the field of life insurance. Around 1963, about fifty black-owned
insurance companies existed nationally; for the most part, however, blacks were served by white insurance companies that had little interest in the long-term goals of the community. As with Freedom National Bank, Robinson hoped both to make money and to provide blacks with an economic lift. In 1964, along with Arthur Logan and Sam Pierce (who that year became the first black director of the powerful Prudential Life Insurance Company of Boston), he set about securing a charter for a life insurance company. On November 17, 1964, the state insurance department approved a charter for the Gibraltar Life Insurance Company.
The following June, Jack and his partners, who now included whites, filed a stock-offering plan for Gibraltar, as required, with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C. The offering was of six hundred thousand shares at five dollars a share; following the sale, the company would open for business on July 1. But, as with the bank, selling stock proved to be a problem. In December, after a renewed effort, the
Amsterdam News
reported that Robinson was “
readying the sale of stock for his new insurance company next month.” But this second attempt also flopped.
Then, in June 1966, a squib in the same newspaper announced that Robinson had “
an offer to merge his life insurance company with an already existing white company.” Earlier, at least four white companies had offered a merger. The winning company was a sensation: Hamilton Life Insurance Company, barely seven years old but with reported sales of about half a billion dollars. Behind Hamilton was the dynamic figure of young Philip J. Goldberg, who now presented Jack with a rare opportunity. In the proposed merger, Goldberg would name Robinson co-chairman of Hamilton, allow him to appoint three new directors, and give him enviable stock options. “
I am deeply impressed,” Jack told his readers, “by the talent, dedication and sincerity of Philip Goldberg.” At a press conference, the two men pledged to join forces not only to build the company into a billion-dollar firm but also to “pay just as much attention to the Negro market as we are to the white market.”
Jack then took a step he was to regret. He sank $25,000 of his own money, which he could ill afford, into the purchase of stock in Hamilton Life; at some point he and Rachel’s brother Chuck Williams acquired 14,000 shares. Jack would see little of this money again. Within a year, the news broke that Hamilton Life was in deep financial trouble, $800,000 in debt. On February 2, 1968, the Securities and Exchange Commission suspended over-the-counter trading in Hamilton stock. The next month, the state superintendent of insurance barred it from writing new policies. Jack’s son David would recall the bitterness he felt as a youth at the loss of his parents’ money, which he blamed on one man at Hamilton Life. “
I could never
understand how this man could have taken our money. We knew where he lived, on the East Side, we knew the building and I would go by it, and it was all I could do not to kick the door in and demand it back.”
On February 2, 1965, not long after Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration, Jack and Rachel attended a dinner at the White House for Vice-President Humphrey, House Speaker John McCormack, and Chief Justice Earl Warren. For Rachel, the highlight of the evening was probably a whirl around the floor with Johnson, who danced only three times before withdrawing for the evening. Although Jack still had misgivings about Johnson, he also believed that now, unlike in 1961, he had a genuine friend in the White House in Humphrey. A few days later, Humphrey assured Jack that the President had asked him to make certain that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbade discrimination in employment and public accommodations, and gave the Justice Department means to enforce the law, was “
fully implemented.”
Soon, events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, vividly caught on television, tested Johnson’s nerve. In Selma, on March 7, a force of state troopers and deputies, using tear gas, whips, and clubs, crushed a march led by Dr. King and John Lewis of SNCC in protest against the killing of a civil rights worker and the jailing of hundreds of demonstrators taking part in a voter-registration drive. Dispatching a furious telegram to the President demanding “
immediate action” in Selma, Robinson warned that “one more day of savage treatment by legalized hatchet men could lead to open warfare by aroused Negroes. America cannot afford this in 1965.” But by the time the White House acknowledged receipt of this message, Johnson had taken a historic step. Summoning a joint session of Congress, he proposed a civil rights bill that would end all impediments to voter registration based on race. The United States, he insisted, “
must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” He then closed his speech by invoking the most sacred slogan of the civil rights movement, “We shall overcome.”