In 1898, the same year that white supremacists overthrew the elected government of Wilmington and murdered an unknown number of Black residents ninety miles away, three Black men in Durham, North Carolina founded an insurance company. John Merrick, Aaron McDuffie Moore, and Charles C. Spaulding incorporated the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association with $1,500 in capital and an idea that was both practical and radical: that Black Americans, systematically excluded from white insurance companies that refused to cover them or charged them discriminatory rates, would build their own institution to protect their families. What they built became the largest Black-owned business in the United States — an institution that W.E.B. Du Bois documented, that Booker T. Washington celebrated, and that sustained the economic life of Black communities across the South for more than a century.
The need NC Mutual was founded to address was urgent and specific. White insurance companies in the Jim Crow South either refused to insure Black policyholders entirely or charged them higher premiums for lower benefits — a practice called the “industrial insurance” system that extracted wealth from Black families while providing them inferior coverage. The actuarial argument offered was that Black Americans had shorter life expectancies — a fact that was itself the product of the poverty, inadequate healthcare, and dangerous working conditions that Jim Crow created. The system was designed to be self-perpetuating: discrimination produced the conditions that justified discrimination. NC Mutual’s founders refused the premise. They created an institution that treated Black lives as worth insuring on equal terms.
John Merrick was a barber who had built relationships and capital through his work for wealthy white Durham families, including the Duke family whose tobacco fortune was transforming the city. Aaron McDuffie Moore was a physician — Durham’s first Black doctor — who understood the intersection of health, poverty, and economic vulnerability in Black communities. Charles C. Spaulding, Moore’s nephew, joined as the company’s general manager and became its most consequential leader — expanding it from a local mutual aid society into a national corporation. Under Spaulding’s leadership NC Mutual grew to employ over 1,000 people, maintain offices across multiple states, and hold assets that made it, by the 1920s, the largest Black-owned business in America. The company’s motto — “Merciful to all” — was not a marketing slogan. It was a statement of purpose in a society that had demonstrated the opposite.
NC Mutual was not only a business. It was the institutional anchor of Durham’s Black Wall Street and the financial foundation for an entire ecosystem of Black enterprise. Its success attracted other Black-owned businesses to Parrish Street — Mechanics and Farmers Bank, real estate firms, law offices, newspapers, pharmacies. The concentration of Black capital and Black professional talent on those four blocks created a self-sustaining economy that provided employment, credit, and services to Black Durham residents excluded from the white economy. W.E.B. Du Bois visited in 1912 and wrote that what he found was unprecedented — a level of Black entrepreneurship he had not seen anywhere else in the South. Booker T. Washington visited in 1910 and wrote admiringly about the ambition and achievement of Durham’s Black community. Two men who agreed on almost nothing agreed that Durham was extraordinary.
North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company still operates today — one of the few institutions from the original Black Wall Street era that survived urban renewal, the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the complicated economics of post-Civil Rights America. The construction of Highway 147 in the 1960s destroyed the Hayti community that had grown up around it, demolishing over 120 Black businesses and displacing more than 500 families. The physical neighborhood was gone. But NC Mutual remained. It remains today as the oldest and longest-operating Black-owned life insurance company in the United States — a direct institutional continuity from 1898, the year of the Wilmington Massacre, to the present. The men who founded it in the same year that white supremacists were burning Black political power to the ground understood something essential: that the work of building had to continue regardless of the work of destruction happening around it. That understanding is the Two Americas argument in institutional fo