Charles Clinton Spaulding

Charles Clinton Spaulding was born on August 1, 1874, in Columbus County, North Carolina, one of fourteen children of Benjamin McIver Spaulding and Margaret Moore Spaulding. His people were not tenants but landowners — third-generation members of a distinctive community of free Negro landholders near Whiteville. His father was an independent farmer, blacksmith, and artisan who forged his own tools and built his own furniture, and who was respected as a leader in his community.

Leaving the farm for Durham as a young man, Spaulding began at the bottom — dishwasher, then manager of a struggling Black-owned grocery. His uncle, Aaron McDuffie Moore, and the barber-entrepreneur John Merrick recognized his gift for organization and brought him into the fledgling North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, where in 1900 he became general manager and its tireless, day-to-day driving force.

For more than half a century Spaulding built that company into the largest Black-owned business in the United States, holding assets of more than forty million dollars by the time of his death. Elected secretary-treasurer in 1919 and president in 1923 after Moore's death, he led the firm for twenty-nine years as president and served as its de facto chief from 1900 onward. His success made Durham's Parrish Street famous as the "Black Wall Street."

Known in his lifetime as "Mr. Negro Business," he mentored a generation of entrepreneurs, championed education and civil rights, and gave freely of his counsel and means. Charles Clinton Spaulding died on August 1, 1952 — his seventy-eighth birthday — in the city he helped make a monument to Black enterprise. We honor him as a builder whose ledger was, finally, measured in the dignity and prosperity of his people.