Henry Warren Sewing came from humble beginnings, but his tireless work led to him founding the Douglass State Bank, the first Black-owned and operated bank in the Midwest.
Born in Bremond, Texas, in 1891, his parents were Thomas and Margaret Sewing, who worked as a sharecropper and a washwoman. Sewing helped out the family by seasonally picking cotton and attended public school before he graduated from Tillotson College in 1915.
H.W. met his wife, and aside from a brief military service during World War I, they began settling into Austin, TX. Sewing had taught at Tillotson and Fisk while pursuing his education, so post-college, he found work as an educator in an elementary school before teaching Latin and math at an area high school.
With Black teachers making half of what their White counterparts did, Sewing took an accounting class as a possible new direction.
Sewing ran into a friend of his who was leaving Texas for a better opportunity, and that moment changed his trajectory. Sewing confided with his friend that he wouldn’t mind leaving if an opportunity came his way.
“They [opportunities] will not come to you,” Sewing recalled in his memoir. “You have to go to them.”
Sewing tore up his teaching contract and set out for Chicago, where he looked for work but realized the area wasn’t for him. He took a train to Kansas City and stayed at the Paseo YMCA until he found work in the meatpacking and railroad industries.
“I don’t believe that you can keep a good man down if he is determined to stand up and go forward,” said Sewing.
Before long, he sent for his wife and child. The Sewings settled into Kansas City, KS, and Henry found more suitable work as a math instructor at Western University in Quindaro, KS. The industrious Sewing supplemented his low teacher’s income first as a shoe cobbler, then as a part-time insurance salesman.
This began a successful decades-long career in the insurance industry for Sewing. He was an immediately successful salesman in 1922 for the Standard Life Insurance Company of Atlanta, GA. Prosperous years followed for Sewing, and he became the president and founder of his own Sentinel Loan and Investment Company, which gave out small loans and underwrote insurance policies.
The idea of opening a Black-owned and Black-run bank seemed to come out of nowhere for Sewing. He recalls in his memoir mentioning the need for a Black bank in Kansas at a banquet without having thought of it before. But once the idea was in his mind, he couldn’t shake it, and he set out to open a bank even if it cost him his security.
“I must not only take the risk of losing such a substantial income, along with retirement and welfare benefits, but I must also do it with a smile of satisfaction because I am duty-bound and heaven-bound to take the leadership in these ventures,” Sewing wrote in his diary April 21, 1946.
At the time, there were only eight banks in the US that were Black-owned-and-operated. Sewing hit the road and visited those banks and their owners as he prepared to open his own. Sewing said he didn’t set out to establish a segregated bank but wanted one that was open to all and catered to the underserved Black community in the area.
“The color of a man’s skin is not a safe standard for measuring his credit risk,” said Sewing.
In 1947, he opened the Douglass State Bank at 1314 N. 5th Street, Kansas City, KS, to a great ceremony. A motorized parade began at the segregated Lincoln High School in Kansas City, MO, and ended at Sumner High School, its Kansas counterpart that was six miles away.
“Douglass State is a continuation of the things Frederick Douglass fought for,” remarked a speaker at the bank’s dedication day.
This so-called “Negro bank,” the product of Henry Sewing’s vision, provided home mortgages and small business loans and brought economic development to its community. Douglass State Bank was the first in the area to have a night deposit box, and through their efforts, they showed other area banks that Black folks’ money was just as good as Whites’.
Douglass State Bank was the first in the area to offer home loans to Black individuals no matter where they intended to buy a home. Over the first 30 years of operation, the bank invested more than $17 million in home mortgages, empowering the community with home ownership.
The bank also offered good-paying jobs for the Black community and boasted several future bank presidents they trained and employed.
Henry Warren Sewing passed away in 1980, and Douglass State Bank closed in 1983.
Douglass State Bank opening staff in 1951, seated left to right: E.E. Tillmon, H.W. Sewing, M.O. Grant, Dorotha Garland. Standing: Geraldine Hicks, Estalla Emery, Theodore H. Curry, Ida White, and Mayme Percell. 
Douglass State Bank’s first tellers, left to right: Geraldine Smith, Emma Brady, H.W. Sewing, and Juanita Goodman
Commissioned Douglass State Bank Mural
Upon an expansion, Sewing commissioned local artist Hank Smith to paint a mural-scale history of Douglass State Bank. The mural stayed at the original location of Douglass State Bank when it became Liberty Bank, which recently changed locations.
Mural ownership was transferred to the Sewing family, who donated it to the Black Archives of Mid-America. A dedication ceremony celebrating the mural’s donation and relocation to the Black Archives is set for March 16.
