High Reach, High Mark

"As for myself," wrote the president of the $35 million North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. in 1948, regarding his tour of 15 European countries, "I shall always feel grateful that my ancestors were transplanted to North America. It is the best place in the world that I have found to live and leave one's mark." The president's name was Charles Clinton Spaulding. Last week, at the age of 78, he died in Durham, N.C. And the mark he left was a high mark, made with a very long reach, for Charles Spaulding was a Negro, the son of slaves, born in a North Carolina log cabin ten years after emancipation.

Instead of Charity. At 20, Charles struck out from the farm for Durham, because Durham had a colored school that went up to the eighth grade. At night he washed dishes (at $10 a month) in a hotel, after spending his days in school with a classful of youngsters half his size. After "graduation," his uncle and a barber decided to form the nation's first Negro life insurance company because they were fed up with the custom of "Pass the hat so we can bury this brother." They took on Charles as their first agent.

Selling insurance to the colored people of North Carolina was a matter of squeezing nickel and dime payments from disbelieving clients across the countryside. Stunned by the untimely death of an early client (six weeks after his first payment), the owners had to dig in their own pockets to pay off the $40 policy. But the payment gave them a reputation and sent Spaulding hurrying over to the nearest agent of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. to learn about life expectancies.

The insurance company thrived, especially after it began putting ads on cuspidors and clinical thermometers. The founders branched out into the Mechanics and Farmers Bank, and in the early '20s Spaulding became president of the bank and president of the insurance company. He built the company into the largest Negro-staffed organization in the world, and made himself one of the wealthiest Negroes in the U.S., took a special interest in helping young Negroes start in private business. Through it all he lived his faith in U.S. capitalism, a hard-tested faith that survived taunts of Negroes who hated him for his genial cooperation with whites, and taunts of whites who hated his prosperity.

A Pattern to Follow. "I was well on my way to success before I ever left the farm," he once wrote. "My father had already taught me the most important lessons I have ever learned . . . Benjamin Spaulding believed in the promise of America. He never became disillusioned because, unlike so many, he had never expected something for nothing. His success story is vastly more impressive than mine could ever be, because--starting with the Emancipation--he had to work out a completely new pattern of existence. All I have had to do was to try to follow the excellent pattern he developed."

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