Almost 160 years ago, former President Abraham Lincoln signed the Freedman’s Bank Act, allowing freed Black Americans after the Civil War to have full banking access for the first time. Freedman’s banks were placed across the country, including in Louisiana.
New Orleans housed Louisiana’s first freedman’s bank, but in 1870 Shreveport was added to the list of cities. Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company was Shreveport’s first bank open to the Black American population.
“Where this building right here would open up as the Freedman’s Bank, it would be the first bank open to not only freed African Americans after the Civil War men, but also women as well.”
That’s Dominick Mercer, the Coordinator for Museum Services for the Spring Street Museum, where the bank was once located.
The museum is hosting an exhibit for the bank throughout February. Mercer says that in the preparation for the exhibit, he kept going back to one question: Why Shreveport?
“It really came down to the banking system trying to cover as much of the local African American community as possible,” Mercer says. “The big one was New Orleans, obviously, they had everyone beat. There was a lot of freedmen there even before the Civil War. So, after the Civil War, you look at local freedman populations and it really came down to Monroe and Shreveport.”
Mercer says they used the African American Heritage Foundation’s access to depositor slips to research the history of the bank and its users. Mercer says that these slips noted their birthplace, occupation and place of residence. For example, one slip was for Sarah Jones, a washwoman who Mercer says might have lived near Zion Baptist Church in Shreveport.
This slip is the only one on display at the exhibit.
“But, what we really thought was cool, and this is what drew our attention to it, was under ‘remarks: Draw for herself.’ Meaning only she had access to that bank account,” Mercer says. “And, just, at that time you don’t see that. And this is something we thought should be shown and should be celebrated, that an African American woman in the year of 1870 has the ability to draw for herself in this city.”
Mercer says they suspect Sarah Jones might have been the first woman in Shreveport to be able to draw for herself, which is something that not every bank offered to all women. The bank adds another piece to Shreveport’s history through Samuel Peters, the bank cashier from Dayton, Ohio.
“He was asked to come down to Shreveport because he was running African American schools up there. Well, when he comes down, he has taken over as the bank’s cashier and is eventually elected as Louisiana’s first African American to Congress,” Mercer says. “But, unfortunately, the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1873 claimed his life here in Shreveport before he could step foot into the 1874 Congress. He had pretty high aspirations.”
Freedman’s banks across the country are big parts of Black American history, and they were crucial to Black populations right after the Civil War.
“Granted, the bank did collapse in 1875, but for that five-year window, it was a guarantee that if you wanted some kind of economic venture as a Person of Color, you had that guarantee of that protection of your income,” Mercer says.
After the bank closed, some of its users lost some of what they put into it. Mercer emphasizes that the bank’s story does not end at its closure. The impact of its collapse was lasting, changing the relationship between the affected communities and the banking system.
“Any history, regardless of the narrative, in my opinion, should be told because there’s lessons to be learned.”
After the freedman’s bank’s closure, women and people of color had very limited banking opportunities until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974.
“As far as a federal initiative, you really don’t see that again until the Seventies,” Mercer says. “Which is a tragedy that it took us that it took us that long to go back to what we were starting in the 1870’s. A full hundred years.”
Research for the exhibit began in late 2024, and he made sure they had everything ready for Black History Month in February.
“Not only is this a good story but it’s a story that hasn’t been told that should be shared. People of Shreveport deserve to know that this was here.”