The Banker arrested me, allowing the space for me to grapple with a miscarried and reborn American dream. Directed and co-written by George Nolfi, starring Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson, and bolstered by the performances of Nia Long and Nicholas Hoult, The Banker offers a refreshing vision of pre-Civil Rights era, black American life. It relates the previously untold story of Bernard Garrett and Joe Morris, two multi-millionaire, African American men who in the 1950s found a white man willing to front their real estate business and bank ownership. The necessity of these men presenting a white face to the financial world is both a source of pain and amusement, but they were determined to cross color lines and help provide black communities with loan opportunities for home ownership and business growth.
This is not a story of black suffering, despite the challenges Garrett and Morris faced. The Banker’s depiction of racism is serious, egregious, but there’s a resistance at play in the relationship between Garrett and Morris that manifests as an underlying levity. For me, it was like seeing Maya Angelou’s poem, Still I Rise, brought to life by the beat of an OutKast song. There’s no shying away from the toll racism extracts from Garrett and Morris, but they are determined to dupe a system stacked against them and manage to have some fun while doing it.
The film is something of a migration story—Garrett, along with his wife Eunice and their young son, move from Texas to LA, where Garrett hopes to invest in real estate. He follows in the footsteps of the African American men who came before him, fleeing the post-Civil War South for the North and West in search of economic opportunity. Eventually, Garrett moves back to Texas, the Jim Crow South, in order to effect change in the place that formed and raised him. In this way, I see The Banker in conversation with books like Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, meant to give us an enlarged scope of the history supporting where we currently stand as a country. When I asked why he felt this film was important for today, Nolfi noted the recent exacerbations of divisions in our country and the world, hoping a movie like this one will help us face those divides in service of building a better future together.
I was initially drawn to this story because it’s set in the time period just before my grandparents bought a house in a white neighborhood. Shortly after the Fair Housing Act passed in 1968, their home in a suburb of Washington, D.C. was a newly-built, five-bedroom, three-bath, colonial style, split-level well-suited for family living. By the time I came along, it was the treasured spot for family gatherings, where we spent our holidays and many days in between. Riding my bike up and down the sidewalk, there were kids, black and white, for me to play with. But even as a child, I knew the story and understood it had been a courageous act for my family to risk moving into that home. As I grew up I’d wondered: who were the forerunners of the Fair Housing Act? Who made a way for the possibility of my grandparents’ home, the home that roots me in my childhood? Revolutionaries like Bernard Garrett and Joe Morris did.
Revolutionary, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is someone or something involving or constituting radical change. The propelling force of change is often anger. Nolfi felt that was an important piece of the story to tackle. Early in the movie, Jackson’s character Joe Morris, says to Garrett, “you’re angry, but you don’t show it. That’s the best kind of anger. It fuels you without making you a target.” During the eight hours of interviews with Garrett that serve as the basis of the film, Nolfi mentioned Garrett’s strategy of suppressed anger, the ways it served him, and some of the ways it didn’t. There’s no sense in The Banker that their front man Matt Steiner, portrayed by the likable Hoult, is acting as “white savior” to Garrett and Morris. In a moment that passes so quickly it might be easy to miss its profundity, Steiner tells Garrett, “I want to be like you.” Nevertheless, when Garrett and Morris must act as chauffeur and janitor in order to enter their own bank, Garrett’s chosen invisibility chafed.
Later, Morris calls Garrett a revolutionary. Mackie infuses his role as Bernard Garrett with a gracefully controlled anger in the midst of white signifiers meant to demean his worth: a hard white clap on the shoulder, addressing Garrett as “boy,” a Confederate flag flapping in the breeze of his hometown in Texas. When we hear Garrett referred to as a revolutionary, as a modern audience we’re meant to be reminded how radical the idea of providing black people equal access to capital really was in the ‘40s and ‘50s. The last recorded mass lynching in America had taken place only as recently as 1946. In the wake of this terrorism of black communities, Garrett held to the audacious belief that all men deserved a chance at the American dream.
All men. It’s a point the character of Bernard Garrett’s wife, Eunice, reminds him of when he needs to hear it most—that her dignity and autonomy is worth just as much as his. Throughout the film, Nia Long’s presence as Eunice is like an anchor, inviting us to remember the sea of women who grounded movements and revolutionaries, nourished them, and strategized alongside them. Long is graceful and honest, exuding enough grit and verve to hold her own in the financial arena dominated by men. Delving into the research, Nolfi found that “Eunice was mentioned repeatedly…as his partner.” She’s mentioned in the Senate records, in title records, and it was clear she was heavily involved in the building of his wealth. Women must be included in the dream in order for the dream to survive.
Along with women, the black church must not be overlooked in the fight against systemic, economic injustice and racial inequality. The Banker briefly points to the role Texas faith leaders played in spreading the word to the community about the loans offered by Garrett and Morris’ bank. It seemed that home ownership might finally be within reach, but it’s a stretch that many black Americans still can’t afford to make. As of 2019, the U.S. Census reported “black alone” home ownership rates to be the lowest in the country. I’m reminded of the words of Reverend William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign: “poverty and economic inequality cannot be understood apart from a society built on white supremacy.” We know from the testimonies of people like Rev. Barber, Dorothy Day, Valarie Kaur, bell hooks and Jacqui Lewis, as well as the testimony of our own souls, that revolutionary love is the breath pushing through racism and birthing new ways of being in community with each other.
In the end, Nolfi says his highest honor would be for high school kids to see The Banker and feel empowered by the history they encounter there, in hopes of inspiring innovation in our next generation. And it’s already possible The Banker may do just that. After screening the film, the City Council of Philadelphia sent a letter to Apple TV+, writing, “great films and moments in history realize their full potential when they reach people…More people in the communities we represent must see this film.”
Today, my grandparents’ home has fallen out of family hands. I sometimes search Google Images for a current picture of the place that resides so strongly within my memory. The giant pine tree in the front yard has been cut down. White paint on one of the windowsills is chipping. There are no more flowers spreading jaunty spots of color across the property grounds. The inevitable effects of time and age unsettle me, even as I acknowledge their place in this narrative of home. In my dreams, I can afford to buy this house and reclaim it, making it a monument to a simple – yet extraordinary – act of one black family. In my dreams, it’s not only a monument, but a place where I wallow in the resonance of my family’s courage. In my dreams, I too, am home.
Jasmin Pittman Morrell is a writer in Asheville, NC.
