Charles Clinton Spaulding was an American insurance executive and bank president. He became one of the leading articulators of the idea of Afro-American progress through success in business.
Background
Charles was born on August 1, 1874 near Whiteville and Clarkton, in Columbus County, North Carolina, United States, the son of Benjamin McIver Spaulding and Margaret Ann Virginia Moore Spaulding. His father, a farmer, blacksmith, and artisan, served as county sheriff during Reconstruction.
Education
Spaulding attended the local school, but most of his time was devoted to work on his father's farm and he was able to complete only the early elementary grades. In 1894 he moved to Durham and enrolled in the Whitted Grade School. His formal education ended when he finished there in 1898. Spaulding supported himself while attending school by working successively as a dishwasher in a hotel, a bellboy, and a waiter.
Career
Upon leaving school, Spaulding became manager of a cooperative grocery store established by twenty-five black citizens of Durham, but the grocery company suffered financial reverses in 1899, and Spaulding was left with the store and a debt of $300.
He paid off the indebtedness within five years. Spaulding then became associated with the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association, which became the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company.
This struggling insurance enterprise had begun in 1883, when a group led by John Merrick bought a fraternal insurance society, the Royal Knights of King David. Merrick, a former slave and brickmason, was a prosperous Durham barber whose regular customers included the tobacco entrepreneur Washington Duke.
Merrick and six other men, including Aaron Moore, reorganized the fraternal society in 1898 and formed North Carolina Mutual as an industrial insurance association. The following year Merrick and Aaron Moore bought out the five other investors and took control. Later in the year they invited Spaulding to become manager of the company. Spaulding was not only general manager but also janitor and agent. He immediately began to recruit agents, largely from among black schoolteachers and ministers, and to expand and develop Mutual's market.
At the end of his first year Mutual's income of $395 had doubled. By the end of 1903, the business had developed to the point that the board of directors placed Spaulding on salary and permitted him to devote most of his time to administration. Under the leadership of the "triumvirate" - John Merrick, Aaron Moore, and C. C. Spaulding - North Carolina Mutual developed into the largest black business in the country. By the 1920's Mutual and its satellite enterprises caused Durham to be heralded as the Capital of the Black Middle Class.
In 1904 it expanded into South Carolina, and by 1920 it was operating agencies in nine states and the District of Columbia. Although there were periods of retrenchment, at the time of Spaulding's death North Carolina Mutual had assets of $37, 694, 297 and insurance in force of $179, 166, 802.
He used his contacts with white philanthropists and foundations to promote black higher education, and he served on the boards of trustees of several colleges, and on the national executive committees of the YMCA and the Boy Scouts of America.
Spaulding died at Durham, North Carolina.
Achievements
Religion
An active layman in the White Rock Baptist Church in Durham, Spaulding also was influential nationally in his own denomination and in other black churches. Deeply religious, he saw the black church as fundamental to the black community.
Politics
Although Spaulding placed great faith in advancement through economic progress, he did not eschew politics. He promoted black political participation in Durham, served on state and national advisory committees on unemployment and relief during the Great Depression, and gained some political influence in Washington during the New Deal. He used this influence to obtain jobs for blacks and to lobby against discrimination in New Deal programs. Fundamentally, however, Spaulding saw himself as a businessman; and he considered cooperation the goal toward which black businessmen should work.
Views
He was a firm believer in racial self-help and cooperation, and he held that the builders of successful black enterprises were not only persons of character who knew how to operate businesses on sound principles, but people committed to serving humanity.
Membership
He was a member of the National Negro Insurance Association and of the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association.
Connections
On September 26, 1900, Spaulding married Fannie Jones, who was John Merrick's half sister; they had four children. She died in 1919; and on January 3, 1920, he married Charlotte Beatrice Stevens Garner.