In the late 1960s public-spirited citizens in many United States cities complained that the established banks of their communities were not lending to residents of ghettos and predominantly black areas. Many banks simply refused to lend in minority areas at all no matter how qualified the borrower or how valuable the collateral.
This practice, called “redlining,” was later banned, but it was legal then. So in response, the citizens organized community banks to be based in the redlined areas. Perhaps 50 or more banks across the nation were formed at this time.
In Portland, the public-spirited citizens organized the Freedom Bank of Finance. Downtown businesspeople bought some of the shares (typically $500 or $1000 worth each) and North and Northeast Portlanders bought the rest, in smaller amounts. The organizers engaged as the new bank’s president a real estate broker named Venerable F. Booker, a lively and affable man in his mid-40s who had no previous banking experience. They set him up in a cavernous abandoned bank branch on Northeast Union Avenue (now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard).
Mr. Booker, who died on January 30 at age 84, told me that the people who hired him expected him and the bank to fail. Most of these banks failed. They made loans on sympathy instead of security, had second-rate or no underwriting for their loans, and hired unneeded staff. Mr. Booker, who bought stock in the bank himself at the start, didn’t want to fail. He hired an experienced retired banker to teach him how to make loans. He kept expenses down. He insisted on adequate security for the bank’s loans.
He was also a hands-on manager. He had a private office available at the bank, but most of the time he sat at a desk on the bank floor where he could see the customers and tellers. On two occasions men attempted to rob the bank. As they were leaving with the money, Mr. Booker drew his pistol and shot the robbers. The FBI reportedly used the bank’s security tapes of Mr. Booker shooting the robbers as part of a training film on how not to deal with bank robbers, but, Mr. Booker told me, “After I shot the second robber word got around that it was not safe to rob our bank, and we never had another robbery.”
Do you recall the advertisements for home-study music classes that started, “They laughed when I sat down at the piano”? Mr. Booker could have said, “They laughed when I sat down at the bank.” He told me that the Portland bank presidents of 1968 treated him with a sort of polite condescension: he was black (bankers weren’t supposed to be black in 1968), he had no banking experience, and he was supposed to last only a year or two in the banking business. But a funny thing happened on the way to the predicted bankruptcy: his bank didn’t go there. Instead, his bank (later renamed the less provocative “American State Bank,” with the slogan “The bank that integration built”) made money – not a lot, but enough to stay in business for the next 32 years with him as president, until, nearing his 80th birthday, he sold it to Albina Community Bank and retired. By that time all of his competitors – the banks that had laughed at him in 1968 – had closed or been sold. He had the last, and best, laugh of all.
Mr. Booker was a major part of the drive to memorialize the late Gladys McCoy with a plaque and open space near the bank office. Somewhere close by, the city should make room for another plaque to tell Mr. Booker's own remarkable story.
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