From the 12/26/2004 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
"I just don't think social service programs were doing it," said Margaret Henningsen, co-founder of Legacy Bank, at Fond du Lac and North avenues on the north side, the nation's only fully accredited lending institution owned by African-American women.
Legacy Bank epitomizes the new economic paradigm in all its promise and limitations.
As a federally insured commercial bank in the heart of the black community, it exists to inject capital into expansion-minded businesses and central-city start-ups. Legacy Bank began five years ago when it acquired a colonnaded 1928 bank edifice with a marble-festooned lobby that sparkles today with a fresh $2.9 million renovation.
In the past two years, Legacy Bank doubled its assets to $99 million - proof, Henningsen said, of bona fide opportunity in an area that other banks have ignored. It boasts a low rate of loan defaults.
Legacy Bank often finds itself working with the building blocks of basic enterprise: mom-and-pop businesses, filling stations, restaurants and construction firms. Innovative, knowledge-driven black firms are harder to find. More of its deposits come from outside the city and even outside the state than from its immediate surroundings in the heart of Milwaukee's oldest black community, once called Bronzeville.
"I remember this neighborhood when it was thriving," several decades ago, Henningsen said. She grew up nearby and admired the corner bank building her whole life. "I always wanted to be at this intersection because it's the heart of the city," she said.
"I've been called a black George Bailey," she said, referring to the 1946 film, "It's a Wonderful Life" in which the character heads a tiny savings cooperative that struggles to provide home and small business loans to the immigrants and poor in a small town.
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