By Hazel Trice Edney | SACOBSERVER.COM WIRE SERVICES

WASHINGTON (NNPA) - When Rev. Joseph Roberts, pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, needed money for a bigger sanctuary for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's former pulpit, he couldn't find a bank willing and able to fund the project.

The new, 2,000-seat Horizon Sanctuary sits across the street from the old Heritage Sanctuary in Atlanta thanks to the combined efforts of five Black-owned banks.

"We knew that our bank, Citizens Trust Bank, which was Black - where we did all of our banking - just did not have the capacity to do a $6.5 million loan," Roberts recalls. "And so we had to go to the majority (White-owned) banks and we tried them. They said we did not have enough to collateralize a $6.5 million loan. They said, 'You could sell all your members and they still wouldn't provide enough equity to cover that,'" he chuckles.

His 1,800-member congregation simply could not finance the entire project out of pocket. And the U. S. Department of Interior was pressing to make the old Ebenezer a tourist attraction and having the church move across the street to a new sanctuary.

James E. Young, president and chief executive officer of Citizens Trust, came up with a solution. He volunteered to take the lead in talking to four other Black-owned banks around the country to see if they could all pool their resources to fund the construction. He called on his counterparts at City National Bank of New Jersey, in Newark; Citizens Bank in Nashville; First Tuskegee Bank in Alabama; Seaway National Bank in Chicago. They agreed to join forces on the project.

"That's how the pieces were put together," recalls Roberts. "And we haven't missed a note."

The new 2,000-seat Horizon Sanctuary now stands across the street from the old 700-seat Heritage Sanctuary, now leased to the Department of Interior. The $8 million edifice, built with $1.5 from its members as well, is not only a monument to God, but a symbol of what Black-owned banks can do within the communities that use them.

"We would never have gotten the new church up if it had not been for the initiative taken by the Black banks and for their willingness to do some risk capitalization," Roberts says.

Many of the nation's Black banks survived the Great Depression of the early 1930s, Jim Crow and integration brought on by the Civil Rights Movement. And they are still trying to survive. They are fighting negative perceptions in some quarters and a reluctance of some African Americans and organizations to use Black-owned institutions.

"Sometimes I lay awake at night and I hear this swooshing sound," says Young, president of the 83-year-old Citizens Trust, the largest Black-owned bank in the Southeast with $374 million in assets. "Billions and billions of dollars are leaving our community to be put under management by someone who does not look like us, does not empathize with us and at most will have only one of us on the board."

There are a total of 38 Black-owned banks in America. Because of limited deposits, none of them has a lending capacity of more than $3.5 billion.

"In every urban center in this country, we could have a billion dollar-plus financial institution if only a few of those organizations in those cities supported Black-owned banks with a deposit and with their borrowing," says Gregory St. Etienne, executive vice president of Liberty Bank & Trust Company in New Orleans and chairman of the National Bankers Association, an organization that includes 33 Black-owned banks.

Deborah Cole, president and chief executive officer of 100-year-old Citizens Bank in Nashville, admits that some Black banks make mistakes, but sees a double standard.

"I think any Black institution, whether it's a doctor's office or a bank, it's just like a majority institution, you make mistakes," she says. "Unfortunately, the mistakes in a Black institution are amplified in comparison to a majority institution. And that's a thinking process that I can't change."

Black banks can help change communities.

Citizens Bank, for example, has made more than $13 million in commercial development loans over the past year, much of it for housing and business developments on Jefferson Street, near historically Black Tennessee State University.

Ironically, while many in the Black community are turning their backs on Black-owned banks, some of the nation's largest businesses are patronizing Black banks.

"Whether it's Wal-Mart, Ford, GM, Coca-Cola, you name it," says St. Etienne. "And those guys will borrow from us, but they'll do $50 million, $20 million, $30 million dollars. And the lead bank will then call upon all the other members to see if they're interested in taking a slice."

The two largest African American financial institutions, One United Bank in Boston and Carver Federal Savings Bank in New York, each has assets totaling approximately $500 million.

Like major White institutions, some Black banks have merged or expanded.

OneUnited Bank in Boston has expanded to Florida and Los Angeles; Liberty Bank in New Orleans has expanded to Jackson, Miss., and Citizens Trust in Atlanta has bought a bank in Birmingham, Ala.

"I expect that to continue," says Young. And that's not the only thing he expects to continue.

"That money is being ciphered off and used around the world," he says. "Kosovo and Iraq, I always say, will be rebuilt using funds from Martin Luther King Drives in American cities while those drives remain in squalor. I'm not fearful of a zip code simply because there are a lot of Black folks there. I've lived in those zip codes. I know the people in those zip codes. So, I know they will pay."

But will they support Black banks?

"If we could bring ourselves to support these institutions at no risk, our communities would be stronger because it would be us who would be making decisions about where that money is invested, Young explains. "It's a badge of honor, I guess, if we can claim that we have a checking account with a major bank. But that's another thing that isn't always as it appears. They're contributing to that great swooshing sound."

Hazel Trice Edney is a NNPA Washington Correspondent.