December 15, 1923
On December 15, 1923, the Philadelphia Tribune featured an advertisement from Brown & Stevens Bank for a “Christmas Club.” A Christmas Club was a saving program where bank customers would deposit a set amount each week in a savings account so at the end of the year they would have money to spend at Christmas time. The bank run by Edward Cooper Brown and Andrew Stevens Jr. was one of the largest and most successful black banks in the North in this era. When E. C. Brown died in 1928, the Tribune wrote that “the curtain was rung down on the finale of one of the most spectacular, and in many ways remarkable life works of any business man of our group in the present generation.”
