Carroll Napier Langston (1881-1972), lawyer, banker, and businessman, was one of the principal founders of the One-Cent Savings Bank in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1904, it was the first Black institution of its kind and remains operational today as Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company, the oldest continuously owned Black financial institution in the country. Langston was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 11, 1881, to a distinguished family on both his mother’s and father’s sides. His father was Arthur Dessalines Langston, a high school principal, and his mother, Ida M. Napier, was a music major graduate of Fisk University. His paternal grandfather, John Mercer Langston, was an abolitionist, the founding dean of the law school at Howard University, a congressman from Virginia, a consul to Haiti, and, 20 years later, a great-uncle to the poet Langston Hughes.
Known among family members and friends as “C.N.,” Langston was the younger of Arthur Dessalines Langston and Ida Napier Langston’s two children. His older brother, John Mercer Langston, was named after his grandfather. His maternal grandfather was William Carroll Napier, a free man and former slave, who set up a livery service in Nashville and, during the Civil War, operated as a spy for the Union Army. It was William’s son, C.N. Langston’s uncle, James Carroll Napier, who delivered Nashville’s mayor to the banks of the Cumberland River, where he surrendered the city to advancing Union troops. James Napier served as Registrar of the Treasury under President Howard Taft in 1911, but it was as an associate of Booker T. Washington and a member of the National Negro Business League that he cofounded, along with his nephew, C.N. Langston, and others, the One-Cent Savings Bank.
Carroll N. Langston graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1903. On November 5 of that year, he joined his uncle, James Carroll Napier, Dr. Richard Henry Boy, Preston Taylor, and five additional members of the National Negro Business League in Napier’s offices with the idea of founding a bank to provide financial services and opportunities for wealth building to the Black community. The One-Cent Savings Bank opened on January 16, 1904, in the Napier Court Building at 411 North Cherry Street. The bank was key to the Civil Rights Movement in Nashville, helping to finance the cause in 1906 when it served as the depository for the Defense Fund of the Afro-American Council.
Langston also served as secretary of Nashville’s James G. Blaine Republican Club, named for the U.S. Senator/Secretary of State whose efforts enabled passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing African Americans citizenship and equal protection under the law.
It was in the 1920s that C.N. moved his family to Illinois. He married Fisk graduate Minnie Vivian Cashin on July 3, 1906, and she had given birth to their only child Carroll N. Langston, Jr., in 1917. There, C.N. took a job as a financial officer in Chicago’s first Black-owned bank, the Binga State Bank. He enrolled at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, earned a law degree in 1933, at the age of 52 years, and was admitted to practice before the Illinois State Supreme Court. He practiced law with his wife’s youngest brother, James B. Cashin, before opening his own firm.
Sometime after losing their son, Carroll N. Langston, Jr., a Tuskegee Airman, over the Adriatic Sea during WWII, Langston, Sr., returned South with his wife, Vivian, to her native Alabama, where he passed away in Huntsville in 1972 at age 90, and she passed in 1974.
Carroll N. Langston was a member of the Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, the oldest predominantly Black Greek-Letter fraternity in the nation, where both he and his brother-in-law, James B. Cashin, served as Grand Sire Archon (president).
The post Carroll Napier Langston (1881-1972) appeared first on BlackPast.org.