Word: harlem
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...congregation in the small Methodist church in Harlem listens attentively as the special Sunday speaker approaches the end of his sermon. He tells them that the church needs money, and that they can help if they come to the Freedom National Bank and deposit their money there. The bank will use the accounts as collateral. Against this collateral it will issue the church fathers the mortgage on the church which they have been refused because of an alledged shortage of mortgage funds...
Such a Sunday morning solicitation pointedly illustrates the ambiguity of the bank's role in the Harlem community. As Harlem's first Negro-staffed and directed bank, now only a year-and-a-half old, Freedom National Bank is a symbol of what Negros can do to help themselves, according to the President of the bank, Willam F. Hudgins. Hudgins feels that going to the people by taking to the pulpit is a legitimate tactic in his crusade to bring full banking service to a community where discrimination in the money market is one of its many economic handicaps...
...picked up extra depositors is a clear case of exploitation. To the skeptics, the Freedom National Bank is simply an example of middle-class Negros taking advantage of race sympathy for their own personal gain. To them, Hudgin's bank, like the other ten, white-run, banks in Harlem, is one more part of the power structure, one more reason why Harlem is an economic colony of New York city. They feel that Negro bankers who live outside Harlem--as do almost all of Freedom National's employees--can drain money out Harlem just as effectively as the white businessmen...
Hudgins agrees that white businessmen are responsible for draining money out of Harlem. But he has his own view of how Harlemites can reposess and increase, the wealth of their community. Every dollar which goes into the pocket of a white Harlem businessman and is spent or deposited in a bank in the Bronx or "downtown" is a dollar which does not get invested in Harlem. If businessmen and individuals can be persuaded to deposit their money at Freedom National and other Harlem banks, the banks will be able to make loans to Negroes to purchase and improve homes...
...addition, Hudgins maintains that Negroes are contributing more to Harlem by dealing with the Freedom National Bank because it is doing more for Harlem than the other, white-owned, banks. Hudgins claims that the bank makes long-term loans to Negroes which they cannot obtain from white banks. In practice, the degree and nature of such discrimination is difficult to measure, since many Negroes who would like to borrow have low incomes--median Negro income in New York City is a little more than half that of median white income--and cannot hope to measure up to the established credit...