A Soul and a Service: North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance

The North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association (the Mutual) was founded in 1898 as a for-profit entity selling life insurance catering to the Black community. The Mutual was entering a field crowded with established White-owned competitors that largely refused to sell policies to Blacks. The Mutual would grow into one of America’s most successful Black-owned businesses, with operations in over 20 states. It offered one possible solution to the ongoing debate between two prominent Black intellectuals, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, which asked how postbellum Black interests would best be served: by forgoing Black political activism in favor of cultivating a broad base of technical excellence to compete in the White economy, or by building up Black political power by encouraging and training a small cadre of Black talent. Trading on its reputation as a company “with a soul and a service,” the Mutual’s answer to that question was: both. Was the Mutual’s model a sustainable one for Black entrepreneurship? How should the company evolve to prepare for the desegregation of the mid-20th century? Which lessons should Black entrepreneurs in today’s more racially integrated world take from the Mutual, and which should they leave behind?