As the second eldest son,it became clear to Charles that he would have to leave the family farm to to make his way in the world.In 1894 he moved to Durham to live with his uncle,AaRon McDuffie Moore,the city's only African American physician and pharmacist.Charles completed his high school equivalency two years later and worked variously as a bellhop,waiter,dishwasher, and office assistant before taking over the management of a cooperative grocery store in 1898. For a young man of Charles ambition Durham was the right place at the right time. Once a sleepy village,Durham was by the 1890s a bustling, industrious city whose tobacco factories drew thousands of African-Americans & white workers from the sourrounding countryside and produced vast profits for white businessmen like James Buchanan Duke.
Enterprising African American such as Aaron Moore & John Merrick could only dream of James millions. But imbued with the entrepreneurial ethos of Booker T. Washington they readily understood the business opportunities made possible by the city's rapidly expanding African American population and by the city's rapidly expanding African American population and by the prevailing white preference for racial segregation.Because white insurance companies such as the Prudential,for example,refused to insurance African-American,John & Aaron founded the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association in Durham in 1898.Two years later,with the company floundering,they turned to reorganize the Mutual singlehandedly.
Over the next three years,Charles natural flair for salesmanship,his boundless energy,and his tenacious optimism transformed the company's fortunes.He began his workday sweeping and mopping the Mutual's floors,spent his mornings and afternoons hawking insurance policies door to door and street corner to street corner,and worked well into the knight attempting to balance the company's books. The long hours that he worked left little time for personal life,in 1900 he married Fannie Jones,with whom he had four children before her death in 1919. The Mutual flirted with bankruptcy on several occasions, by 1903 Charles had earned the trust of hundreds of policyholders and had secured insurance agents in fifty towns in North & South Carolina.That year Charles finally awarded himself a set salary-fifteen dollars a week-and also launched an innovative company magazine,the North Carolina Mutual,which published testimonials from satisfied customers and helped to build the company's reputation for trustworthiness.
The Mutual's greatest achievement lay in making life and sickness policies affordable to the great mass of African Americans,with premiums beginning as low as only five or ten cents a week.By 1907 Charles presided over a new,imposing brick headquarters,which serviced the needs of more than 100,000 policyholders.Advertising itself as "the Greatest Negro Insurance Company in the World," the Mutual encouraged the formation of other of other African American owned businessesses in Durham and with Charles at the fore helped established ans support,a hospital,a library,a college,a literary club,three newspapers,and even a baseball team for African Americans in Durham.In 1911 Charles effort's at the Mutual earned the endorsement of his hero,Booker T.Washington,who praised the entrepreneurial spirit of African American Durhamities in a national newsweekly.W.E.B. Du Bois echoed these views a year later and contrasted the favorable climate for African American businesses in Durham with the hostility of whites to African American business development in Atlanta.
By the time that Edward Franklin Frazier dubbed Durham "the Capital of the Black Middle Class"in the early 1920s,the Mutual had presence in eleven Southern states and employed 1,100 workers.Charles,Charles who married Charlotte Garner in 1920,assumed the presidency of the Mutual in 1923 upon the death of Aaron Moore and retained that position until his death twenty-nine years later.In the 1920s & 1930s Charles emerged as the most powerful African American businessman of his era.In addition to his leadership of the Mutual he was prominent in the National Negro Business League (NNBL),which had been founded by Booker T.Washington in 1900.When the NNBL was on the verge of collapse in the late 1930s,Charles rescued it,almost at the cost of his health.iN 1924 Charles founded the National Negro Finance Corporation (NNFC) in the hope yhat it could pool African American capital and expertise in a central location and provide loans for African Americans entrepreneurs.In 1927 Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover endorsed the NNFC's goals and praised Charles efforts in Durham,this early experiment in government supported African American capitalism was a victim of the Depression.That the Mutual survived the Depression years while so many other companies failed was thanks in part of Charles skills in lobbying Congress to provide loans through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.A more significant role was played by Charles's second cousin,Asa Timothy Spaulding the nation's first African American actuary,who mastered the company's successful modernization after joining the Mutual in 1933.Charles gathered around him a cadre of talented executives,including the board's only female member,Viola Turner.As Viola recalled,"nobody ever doubted that "Papa" was in charge.
The Mutual's secure business footing enabled Charles to pursue his broader social and political goals. He continued to fund and support libraries,schools,college,and youth groups throughout the South, and he served as trustee of Howard University in Washington,D.C., sHAW university IN Raleigh,AND THE THE north Carolina College for Negroea (NCCN) in Durham.In 1932,Charles registered as a Democrat and had the ear of several prominent New Dealers,including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.He also enjoyed unprecedented access to, and influence on, several governors,state legislators,and other members of North Carolina's white political elite.
Yet such connections and his wealth could not always protect Charles from the worst excess of Jim Crow racism,most notably in 1931 when a white man attacked and beat him in a Raleigh drugstore.The NAACP national secretary Walter White also criticized Charles in 1933 for sabotaging an early legal challenge to segregation when NAACP activists sought admission for the Durham native Thomas Hocutt to the pharmacy school on the University of North Carolina's flagship white campus at Chapel Hill.Rembering the bloody violence of the Wilmington race riot three decades earlier,Charles feared that such a blatant challenge to segregation would provoke a violent white blacklash,and he joined with the NCCN president James Shepard to block Thomas admission.Charles later tried to parlay his opposition to James into increased public spending on African American education, white lawmakers ignored his entreaties.
The Hocutt case marked a turning point in Charles evolving political liberalism. Afterward he proved more willing to work with the state and national NAACP,most notably in helping to fund and organize a campaign for equalizing teacher's salaries and
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