JULY 18th, 1870
Fredrick Douglass sat before the Board of Directors in a modest room located in Baltimore, Maryland. The sun shone through the small windows, blanketing the men seated inside and making the hot room hotter. Douglass produced a handkerchief and wiped his brow, silently swearing. It wasn't so much the heat that bothered him -he had long grown used to it, having worked a large chunk of his life on slave plantations. It was really the purpose of this meeting that had him agitated; the heat just added to it.
"So Mr. Douglass" a Board member began. "Do you think the bank can be saved?"
Douglass paused briefly before picking up a briefcase at his side. Removing papers from it, he replied: "Yes. The Freedman's Bank
can survive, but it's going to be difficult, very difficult." Leafing through the paperwork before passing it out, he continued. "We're going to need to sell off a great deal of our property, obtain heavy loans -which won't be easy considering the financial situation today-, and maybe get government aid... as unlikely as that is."
Reaching for a pitcher of water to refill his glass, Douglass waited for the rest of the Board to read over the documents and his plans, all the while brooding over the Bank's situation. The horror he felt as he looked over the Bank's finances all those months ago! The corruption and cronyism was epidemic, and the foolishness of the investments! $10,000 in a railroad here, $55,000 in land speculation there, loans given with no collateral, and so much graft! Douglass nearly stepped down once the full situation become apparent, but he knew that he could not leave his fellow Freedman in the lurch for the tune of $3.7 million. The new African-American community could not survive such a blow.
Another Board member spoke up. "Your plan is quite extreme Mr. Douglass. What you're outlining here is quite uh... frugal."
Douglass nodded. "If we are to survive, we will need to be frugal in these tough times. The previous Board were the spendthrift ones. We cannot afford to be if we wish to survive and thrive in the future."
The Board of Directors, all of them black, agreed unanimously.
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Author's Note: The POD I have set is that the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company (or simply Freedman's Bank) survives thanks to a perfect storm of good luck: Douglass is offered leadership earlier, the mismanagement isn't as deep or widespread, the company still has enough assets, yadda yadda. I'm not giving much specifics simply because there aren't many specifics on the company itself. However, the collapse of the Bank was a catastrophe for African-Americans on several levels -it wiped out nearly $3 million in savings (a giant amount for newly freed people) and created massive distrust of the financial system among African-Americans. It also thrust many blacks who were beginning to acquire financial security -including the Civil War veterans- back into poverty. Saving this bank will have great, great repercussions.
Recently I've been plagued by the question: why are we African-Americans the poorest group in the U.S? To answer that question I've been doing some research and the answers I've gleaned are pretty... interesting. Using that research, the goal of this TL is to have African-Americans be more prominent and secure financially and politically by present-day.