Shennette Garrett-Scott
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Shennette Garrett-Scott

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Shennette Garrett-Scott tells the untold stories of Black people whose work in business, labor, finance, and activism transformed their communities and the nation. An award-winning historian and public scholar, she is an associate professor of history and Africana Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Her first book Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal charts how Black women built financial institutions and economic power in the face of racism, sexism, and exclusion. The book was a finalist for the Hagley Prize for best book in business history, and it won three best-book awards: the Darlene Clark Hine Award and the Letitia Woods Brown Book Award in history and the Bennett H. Wall Award in Southern economic history.

Her new book The Business of Freedom: The Golden Age of Black Capitalism follows the entrepreneurs, institutions, and communities that used business in pursuit of the American Dream: prosperity, political power, and freedom. Through richly drawn lives and vivid histories of Black enterprise, the book reframes the American Dream and reveals how race, gender, class, and power have shaped—and been shaped by—economic opportunity in the United States.

She is currently at work on a third book: a biography of Maggie Lena Walker, the first woman in the United States to organize, charter, and run a bank.

Garrett-Scott’s writing has appeared in TIME, The New York Review of Books, Vox, and leading scholarly journals. Her scholarship has also reached broad audiences through PBS, C-SPAN Book TV, Good Morning America, and other national media.

Follow her on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and Threads @sgarrettscott
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