A Rapper, an Entrepreneur, and a Civil Rights Hero Walk into a Bank
Killer Mike’s theory of change has become something of a mantra, promoted in the many public appearances he makes and custom merch he proudly adorns. According to Mike, activism requires five main components: plotting, planning, strategizing, organizing, and mobilizing. Here’s the Cliffs Notes version:
Plot: come up with an idea
Plan: put that idea down on paper
Strategize: take that paper and come up with an action plan
Organize: get input on that plan from others and encourage them to join you
Mobilize: deploy the plan of action by engaging the larger community
Greenwood, the digital bank Mike cofounded as a type of financial protest, shows how strict adherence to this rather simple design for change can create a large-scale impact.
It began in 2016, before Mike admittedly knew what a fintech—financial technology—company was. That year MTV News and BET News hosted a town hall to discuss “America in Crisis,” which took place at the end of a tumultuous week: Police had killed three Black men—Delrawn Small, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile—and videos of their brutal deaths were dominating newscasts and social media channels. With protests raging across the country, a weary but impassioned Mike called into the town hall to plot a new kind of resistance.4
“We know that this country is motivated by two very real things—violence and money—and we cannot go out in the street to engage in acts of violence that will cause more peril to our community and to people who look like us,” he relayed to Charlamagne tha God, one of the town hall moderators and a personal friend. “I encourage us to take our warfare to financial institutions.”
Mike then proceeded to lay out a definitive plan: He encouraged one million people to find one Black banking institution, like Citizens Trust, and open a $100 account “instead of buying Jordans or caps or whatever thing is cool this month.” Assuming the full million took action, Black banks would have a lending power of $100 million and the ability to offer Black families home loans in areas being gentrified. These banks also could make small business loans of $15,000 to $18,000, the kind of loans traditional banks wouldn’t float Mike himself for his first business venture.
The #BankBlack hashtag proliferated Mike’s theory for change over the weekend, and by the following week, Citizens Trust reported 8,000 new accounts.5 Tellers reported people “swarming” the bank’s Atlanta branches.6 For so long, Black-owned banks, which typically had been operating with a lending power in the hundreds of thousands, had been woefully behind mainstream banks like Wells Fargo or Bank of America operating in the trillions. But Mike’s call spoke to people, and a BankBlack coalition was formed from young people dedicated to seeing the mission through. They mobilized communities nationwide, and within a year, most Black-owned banks—at that time there were only twenty-three nationwide—were reporting surges in new accounts; bank assets grew by roughly $60 million.7
In addition to everyday citizens, Black celebrities and business owners began to take action. By the summer of 2016, serial entrepreneur Ryan Glover was in his fifth year at the helm of Bounce TV, a television station he founded to be “the first 24/7 digital multicast broadcast network created to target African Americans.”8 Killer Mike’s message piqued his interest.
“Many entrepreneurs like myself, because of our historically shaky banking relationships with traditional financial institutions or lenders, don’t even think about going to banks to borrow money for capital,” Ryan said. “My grandmother, you know, her savings and depository institution was her mattress.”
African American communities have valid reasons not to trust the American banking system. Centuries of redlining—the practice of denying home and business loans to consumers from neighborhoods with significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities and low-income residents—paralyzed generational wealth building and exacerbated the so-called wealth gap between white Americans and their Black counterparts.
“Equity that families have in their homes is the main source of wealth for middle-class Americans,” Richard Rothstein writes. “African American families today, whose parents and grandparents were denied participation in the equity-accumulating boom of the 1950s and 1960s, have great difficulty catching up now.”9
“We’ve not experienced a hundred years of freedom,” Killer Mike told me. “My parents were born in apartheid. They call it ‘Jim Crow’—that sounds cute—but it wasn’t. It was apartheid. It was a system that did not allow us to take full advantage of the American dream, which is built on the blood and toil of us, out of the cotton fields and out of the industrial revolution that came as a result of cotton picking.”
Through entrepreneurship, Ryan had been successful at alleviating financial burdens for his own family, but he began thinking about ways to make a larger impact on his community. A year after Mike’s call-in to MTV, Ryan sold Bounce to E. W. Scripps Company and promptly made two phone calls: one to the former mayor of Atlanta and United Nations ambassador Andrew Young, who had been part of the original ownership team at Bounce TV; and one to Killer Mike. He wanted his next venture to be a fintech company, and he wanted Andrew and Mike to be cofounders. A businessman, an activist/politician, and a rapper: The trifecta embodies the power and potential of the Black community in the city they call home.
“Mike and Ambassador Young and I come from quasi-different professional backgrounds, but our messages to our community have always been the same,” said Ryan. “We are about the advancement of Black and Brown people through having access to capital.”
Like other fintech companies—Chime, Aspiration, and Varo, to name a few—their company, Greenwood, proposed a completely digital offering of checking and savings accounts with mobile deposits and peer-to-peer transfer capabilities. A sleek platinum black card provides holders access to a global ATM network and mobile wallet services.
What differentiates Greenwood is its mission-driven strategy to finance Black and Latino clientele. Its banking services are provided through its partnership with Coastal Community Bank, allowing its founders and members of the board to focus on community empowerment and growing generational wealth among Black and Latino families. Customers can opt to round up expenditures to the nearest dollar and donate the change to charities like the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the United Negro College Fund. The company uses relationships with FDIC-insured banks to fund a monthly $10,000 grant to a Black or Latino small business owner who has an account with Greenwood. It has committed to providing five free meals to an in-need family for every customer sign-up through its partnership with Goodr, a local organization that uses blockchain technology to repurpose edible surplus food.10
“Our mission is to create non-predatory lending products, to help recirculate capital within our community, and to deploy capital to deserving borrowers, whether it is for personal or business use,” Ryan said. “Ambassador Young would always joke and say, ‘We didn’t have sit-ins at Walgreens to have a ham sandwich at the counter. We wanted to be able to buy the Walgreens.’”
The founders began to organize the offerings and programs that would make Greenwood both a successful fintech company and a successful economic protest. In 2020 the company circulated its idea to the private sector. The campaign raised $3 million in seed funding and $40 million of Series A funding from six of the seven largest US banks and the top two payment technology companies: Truist, Bank of America, PNC, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Mastercard, and Visa.11 Naturally, I wondered how partnering with some of the worst offenders of redlining impacted the integrity of the initiative.
“I believe it takes collaboration and community, a village if you will, to extinguish the multigenerational wealth gap that exists in America,” Ryan offered. “I can’t look at what happened 100 years ago, because my job now is to look forward: to help people like me, who look like me, who have the same hunger, drive, and determination that I have, to reach their goals and dreams in America. So that’s what I’m laser-focused on: looking forward, not behind.”
Buoyed by the momentum of #BankBlack, the credibility of its founders, and its successful funding campaigns, BankGreenwood.com launched in January 2022. Within a week, the waitlist for opening an account was 100,000 deep.
At the heart of Greenwood’s efforts to mobilize its customers is financial literacy. Shortly after opening the waitlist, the bank launched Greenwood Studios, a collection of multimedia resources to inform customers on how best to use or invest their earnings. It produces a daily podcast, Money Moves, hosted by tech maven and Real Housewives of Atlanta personality Tanya Sam, who invites expert guests to discuss financial planning tips. Greenwood financial planner Rianka R. Dorsainvil has a series of video tutorials on handling personal finance decisions, from building generational wealth to making sound investments. Poised Lifestyle founder Sahirenys Pierce partnered with Greenwood to offer a biweekly Q&A called “Ask Me Anything about Money,” where Pierce answers queries sent in via social media.12
The company also offers an online database of Black- and Latino-owned businesses across the country. The Greenbook lets site visitors enter their geographic location, then populates a list of qualifying businesses, sortable by industry.
“Time and time again, Blacks have figured out how to individually liberate themselves—whether it be Herman Russell, Madam C. J. Walker, or Oprah Winfrey,” Mike said. “That’s not the same as creating a culture where you grow culturally competent children who can then participate in the greater society and have an opportunity to have something for themselves.”
Black Wall Street
Some critics argue that capitalism and abolition are fundamentally at odds. They point out that historical instances of human exploitation have often been driven by economic interests and profit motives. In this view, capitalism can perpetuate the exploitative practices that abolition seeks to eliminate. In a 2020 interview with Democracy Now!, for example, Angela Davis said, “I am convinced that the ultimate eradication of racism is going to require us to move toward a more socialist organization of our economies.”13 Abolitionists of this ilk point to slavery, convict leasing, and prison labor as proof that capitalism will inevitably give rise to dehumanization and manipulation.
The relationship between abolition and capitalism can vary depending on how each is conceptualized and implemented within a society. Greenwood’s founders believe an intersectional approach is possible, that economic growth and prosperity can provide alternatives to forced labor, making such practices less appealing. Additionally, in advocating for Black- and Latino-owned businesses that prioritize ethical practices, fair treatment of workers, and a commitment to uplift members of the Black and Latino communities, Greenwood’s reimagined capitalism purports to address not only economic inequality but racial inequalities as well.
The guiding force behind this belief is embodied in the name Greenwood. In the early 1900s, the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was known as Black Wall Street, a place thriving with Black-owned businesses and intra-community currency exchange. While research on racial wealth gaps suggests that less than 3 percent of the Black communities’ $1 trillion in buying power is reinvested into community businesses, historians believe every dollar in Greenwood would exchange hands nineteen times before it entered the mainstream (read: white) economy.14
Founded by wealthy Black landowner O. W. Gurley, the town of Greenwood was a fully self-contained epicenter for former slaves fleeing racism and oppression in the post–Civil War South. After purchasing the land, Gurley set up several boarding houses for African Americans who arrived with minimal resources. He then provided loans for Greenwood residents who wished to start a business. Over time, members of the community built restaurants, movie theaters, a library, clothing stores, grocery stores, barbershops and salons, and offices for doctors, lawyers, and dentists. Residents used the profits from these amenities to establish a Greenwood school system, newspaper, post office, savings and loan bank, hospital, and bus and taxi service.15
“It doesn’t take money to get power,” Killer Mike explained. “It takes organization, it takes the want to win, but once you get money, in my opinion, you are responsible to help others empower themselves.”
Mike grew up in Collier Heights, a neighborhood with a similar foundation to Greenwood. It was financed, designed, and built by middle-class Black Atlantans for middle-class Black families. His neighbors included congressional representatives Cynthia and James McKinney, and developer Herman Russell, whose company’s portfolio includes the Georgia Dome, Turner Field, and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The neighborhood was also home to the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a Pan African Orthodox church founded as a response to the specific theological, spiritual, and psychological needs of African Americans. Mike grew up with Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson—the first of six consecutive Black mayors—who withheld city funds from banks that refused to diversify their boards, forcing financial institutions to increase their inclusion of Black Americans. In very obvious ways, Collier Heights embodied the same kind of self-sufficiency that allowed Greenwood and Black communities to thrive.
At least for Mike, the takeaway lessons from communities like Greenwood and Collier Heights generate the foundational pillars of his financial revolution: circulate dollars intra-communally; reinvest profits into Black-owned businesses; and shift power by creating financial independence and generational wealth. Greenwood bank blends the historical success of the Greenwood district, the modern success of financial technology companies, and the momentum of the BankBlack movement to create a space where Black people are empowered by access to capital.
“I think that Black people need to see ourselves saving something for ourselves, because the stronger that we are as a community financially, the stronger the greater community becomes,” Mike said. “When that community dollar is strong, it affects the bigger community in a stronger way, because they can participate in a fair way, and in a just way, versus just having dollars to give and never get anything in return.”
Mike has always been “political,” highly influenced by his grandmother’s involvement with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But his radicalization came from the revolutionary organizers he grew up with in Collier Heights. Mike would meet Black Panthers and members of the Black Liberation Army and the Nation of Islam on his way to Frederick Douglass High School and learn about their philosophies.
“These are the people that were on the corners, encouraging us as young Black children to educate ourselves, to take care of ourselves,” Mike told me. “What I started to see was, ‘Oh, the things that my grandmother does, it has an even more radical side.’ Like there are people who are like, ‘Let’s burn this shit down.’”
He credits two influential figures from his teenage years with the path he’s been on as an activist and a changemaker for the last three decades: Alice Johnson, a community liaison for the Atlanta police department, and Edward Johnson (no relation), a teacher at the rival high school. Edward and Alice encouraged Mike and his peers to petition the city for a grant to hold a conference where they could articulate what they saw as the biggest problems facing the city at that time. Alice, who was on the mayor’s youth council with Jean Childs Young, arranged for Mike and a few other students to meet with Jean’s husband, then-mayor Andrew Young.
