Charles Clinton Spaulding

Charles Clinton Spaulding was born on the first of August 1874 at the Spaulding family farm at Columbus County, North Carolina, the second of fourteen children of Benjamin McIver Spaulding — a successful Black tenant farmer and small landowner of southeastern North Carolina — and Margaret Ann Moore Spaulding. He was raised in the substantial free-Black landowning community of the lower Cape Fear River valley.

He was placed at eight at the local Coloured school and at twenty at the Whitted Graded School at Durham, North Carolina, completing the high-school certificate there in 1898 at twenty-four — having delayed the education to support the family farm.

He took employment in 1898 at the Coloured Cooperative Business League grocery store at Durham as bookkeeper and rose to manager by 1899. The Cooperative grocery failed in 1900 and Spaulding personally absorbed the firm’s outstanding debts.

He was hired in 1900 by his uncle Aaron McDuffie Moore at the new North Carolina Mutual and Provident Insurance Company at Durham — the firm Moore had co-founded with John Merrick (placed in this archive) on the fifteenth of October 1898. He was the firm’s general manager, sole salesman and bookkeeper at the time of joining.

He held the general manager position across the following nineteen years and rose to vice-president on the death of John Merrick in 1919 and to president on the death of Aaron McDuffie Moore in 1923. He held the presidency of the North Carolina Mutual for the following twenty-nine years until his death in 1952.

The North Carolina Mutual grew under Spaulding’s presidency from approximately ten million dollars of insurance in force in 1923 to over two hundred and twenty-five million dollars at the time of his death — the largest Black-owned insurance company of the world.

He co-founded under the auspices of the Mutual the Mechanics and Farmers Bank at Durham in 1907, the Bankers Fire Insurance Company at Durham in 1920, the Mutual Building and Loan Association of Durham in 1921, and the Durham Realty and Mortgage Company in 1928 — the principal cluster of Black-owned financial institutions of the American South of the inter-war period, which together formed what the Atlanta Constitution and the Detroit Free Press of the period named ‘Durham’s Black Wall Street.’

He was a co-founder of the National Negro Business League at Boston in 1900 with Booker T. Washington (placed in this archive) and served on the Board of Trustees of the Howard University, the Shaw University, and the National Urban League.

He died at Durham on the first of August 1952 of complications of a stroke on his seventy-eighth birthday.

He is honored here as the architect of Durham’s Black Wall Street.