From the 1920s through the 1970s, the Black-owned insurance industry controlled more wealth than any other form of African American business, and played a crucial role in supporting urban and suburban development for African American communities. By 1933, 40 companies were headquartered in 32 cities (mostly in the southeast), serving a primarily working-class clientele. At the sector’s peak in the late 1950s, the number of firms had almost doubled, following the rise of working-class wages in the postwar years. Executives at these firms maintained a delicate balancing act within evolving contexts of racial capitalism, hewing to actuarial forms of thought that tended to deepen class divides, even as they agitated in various ways for civil rights. Such complex and at times paradoxical efforts speak to longstanding debates about whether it is possible to extirpate the racial component of racial capitalism, while leaving the system otherwise intact.
Civil rights issues often dovetailed with insurance firms’ self-interests, since they needed reasonably healthy and financially stable people and places to invest in. That said, activism within the African American insurance sector generally exceeded what might be expected from pure financial calculation. Many company directors dedicated immense time and financial resources to supporting political causes, often without much likelihood of success. Executives from NC Mutual joined their counterparts at firms like Atlanta Life Insurance, Supreme Liberty Life Insurance (in Chicago), Golden State Mutual Life Insurance (in Los Angeles), and Universal Life Insurance (in Memphis) in maintaining close ties with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the National Urban League.
Some executives assumed leadership positions at these organizations; some played vital roles in other ways. Supreme Life’s president Earl Dickerson defended housing integration in Supreme Court hearings, while Atlanta Life’s president Jesse Hill led voter registration drives and personally donated money to bail Martin Luther King, Jr. out of jail. The companies also provided economic support to hundreds of local and regional institutions, including historically Black colleges and universities, churches, and the YMCA; their leaders served in dozens of civic and governmental bodies, including the Los Angeles City Housing Authority, the Chicago City Council, the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, and the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority.
Recent histories of the White-owned insurance industry have critiqued its biopolitical tendencies in the 20th century, as it assumed tasks of wealth redistribution and the provision of healthcare and housing that might otherwise have been performed by the state, in a manner more accountable to democratic processes. To some degree, the same could be said of the African American insurance industry: that it arrogated issues of public concern to the purview of private corporations. It is critical to recall, however, that political power among African Americans was so suppressed in these decades that, in many cases, political causes had to be pursued through extra-political means. Interpolated within a dense civic network, Black insurance companies filled a vacuum left by governmental dereliction, functioning as a kind of shadow state.