Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company

James C. Napier, one of the bank's founders, was born into slavery in Nashville in 1845 and studied at Oberlin before taking a law degree at Howard in 1872. He became the first Black president of the Nashville city council and organized the city's chapter of the National Negro Business League in 1905. President Taft appointed him Register of the Treasury in 1911; Napier resigned in 1913 in protest after Woodrow Wilson ordered segregation of federal workspaces. He married Nettie Langston, a daughter of John Mercer Langston, and died in Nashville in 1940.

What the plaque says

Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company (Obverse) Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company is the oldest, continuously operated African-American bank in the United States. Formerly known as the One-Cent Savings Bank and Trust Company and organized for the uplift of African Americans, it opened on January 16, 1904. African-American Nashville leaders Richard H. Boyd (president), James C. Napier (cashier-manager), and Preston Taylor (chairman) were among the bank's principal founders and officers. (Reverse) Other founders and officers included C. N. Langston (teller), J. B. Bosley, William Haynes, J.W. Grant, E.B. Jefferson, T. G. Ewing, and J. A. Cullom. As the depository for the Defense Fund of the Afro American Council, the bank helped fund the African-American civil rights movement in 1906. The One-Cent Savings Bank and Trust Company, Nashville's first African-American owned bank, changed its name to Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company in 1920.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 0.3 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 1.5 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 1.7 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 1.8 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Dr. Harold Dadford West, Sr. — steps away
• Bombing of the Z. Alexander Looby Home — steps away
• Jefferson Street Music District — steps away
• Desegregating Nashville's Lunch Counters — 0.2 mi