Respected black pastors often urged their congregants to support a black bank, support that instilled the institution with the community trust that it needed to operate. Of the Citizens Trust Bank, founded in Atlanta in 1921, a local Reverend remarked, “the preachers made Citizens Trust Bank. They put in deposits that Monday morning. Around 11:00 o’clock the lobby would be full of nothing but preachers. And the people, seeing their preacher deposit God’s money from the churches in Citizens Trust, put their money into it and helped to put it over, in a great way.”67
