William Patrick Burrell (25 November 1865–18 March 1952), business leader, was the first of the children of William Patrick Burrell and Mildred Burrell to be born free. His father worked as a butler and waiter in Richmond, and his mother took in washing. His uncle James Burrell obtained an education during slavery and became a leader in the city's African American community immediately after the Civil War. Burrell attended the Baker School and the Richmond Colored Normal School, from which he graduated in 1884. At age twelve he joined the Moore Street Baptist Church and eventually became its treasurer and a deacon.
Early in 1881 the church's sexton introduced Burrell to William Washington Browne, who had recently arrived in Richmond from Alabama to reinvigorate the United Order of True Reformers, a temperance organization. Browne proposed to make the True Reformers a mutual benefit society, requiring members to purchase a death-benefit certificate that obligated the order to pay a sum of money to the member's heirs. After Richmond members agreed to his plan, Browne hired Burrell as his secretary.
Although steadfastly in favor of temperance and self-discipline, the Grand Fountain United Order of True Reformers made its insurance features the focus of the order's work. It grew from twelve chapters in 1883 to fifty-one in 1885. In May 1884 Burrell became the order's Grand Worthy Secretary and made the insurance system more actuarially sound by adopting a fee structure based on members' ages. He also taught school in Richmond from 1885 to 1889, by which time the order boasted 254 chapters and 6,500 members. With D. E. Johnson Sr., Burrell wrote the Twenty-Five Years History of the Grand Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers, 1881–1905 (1909).
On 24 December 1885 Burrell married Mary E. Cary, a native of Richmond and a teacher. They had two sons. She joined the True Reformers, assisted in the secretary's office, and proved to be a fine speaker and organizer. The True Reformers continued to expand, and on 3 April 1889 the Savings Bank of the Grand Fountain United Order of True Reformers opened in Richmond, the first chartered bank in the United States owned by African Americans. Mary Burrell served as the bank's first clerk. Although the majority of the order's members were Virginians, chapters existed in more than a dozen other states by the mid-1890s.
The Burrells became important community and state leaders. He served for many years as president of the Richmond Baptist Sunday School Union, and she helped found the Women's Baptist Missionary and Educational Association of Virginia, chaired its executive committee, and served as secretary of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs. Both helped to establish the Richmond Hospital in 1902. Burrell became chair of the hospital's finance committee, and his wife was secretary of the women's auxiliary in charge of the hospital's charity work.
In January 1901 the governor named Burrell one of the state curators for Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University), and he served three consecutive terms in that post through 1912. He attended the annual Hampton Negro Conference and several times addressed it on business-related subjects. Burrell's call at the 1904 conference for insurance companies operated by Blacks to cooperate in compiling statistics for actuarial tables inspired the formation of the Federated Insurance League, a business association of which he became the first president. In 1909 a natural interest in improving health conditions for African Americans led him to organize the Colored Anti-Tuberculosis League in Richmond.
By 1903 the True Reformers had about 60,000 members with chapters in almost every state east of the Mississippi River. The order owned real estate valued in that year at more than $385,000, and in December 1899 it chartered the Reformers' Mercantile and Industrial Association, which operated retail stores in several cities. The order borrowed heavily from its funds in the Reformers' Savings Bank to finance those businesses, but the stores proved unprofitable. In the spring of 1910 the board of directors closed them, hoping that the action would strengthen the order's finances. Early in October, however, prompted by some $50,000 in unpaid death benefits, the state sent a bank examiner to study the savings bank's accounts. On 21 October he informed Burrell that the bank was insolvent. Stunned, Burrell called a meeting of the board of directors. They studied the bank's books for themselves and came to the same conclusion. On 26 October 1910 they closed the bank and put the True Reformers into receivership. That evening, the bank's cashier disappeared with more than $50,000 that he had embezzled.
The bank's depositors and the order's members grew ever angrier as investigation revealed that the True Reformers' real estate assets were overvalued and heavily mortgaged. Burrell denied that he was guilty of wrongdoing and maintained that he had unsuccessfully protested the board's speculations, but the audience at one public meeting walked out when he attempted to speak. Early in August 1911 he and the five other directors were indicted on twenty counts, including permitting a bank that they knew to be insolvent to continue receiving deposits. Two weeks later Burrell tendered his resignation as Grand Worthy Secretary. He was the first officer to be tried, in a proceeding that began on 22 April 1912 and went to the jury on 26 April. The jury deadlocked, and the judge dismissed the case. Indicted again, Burrell went on trial on 28 May 1912. That jury acquitted him, and the prosecutor then dropped the charges against the others. The Richmond Planet reported on 8 June 1912 that the outcome had produced widespread dissatisfaction.
The Burrells and their two sons moved first to Brooklyn, New York, and by 1915 to Newark, New Jersey. There they constructed new careers of civic activism. In 1915 Burrell helped to organize the Federation of Colored Organizations of New Jersey, which he and his wife both served as officers. Mary Burrell also became a leader of the Federation of Colored Women's Clubs of New Jersey, and husband and wife were both active in the Republican Party. Burrell served as a doorkeeper (1928–1929) and a file clerk (1930–1931) for the state legislature. During the 1930s he became a social worker and in 1942, at the age of seventy-seven, he was ordained a Baptist minister. His younger son, John Mercer Burrell, an attorney, represented Essex County in the New Jersey legislature from 1933 to 1936. William Patrick Burrell died in a Newark hospital on 18 March 1952 and was buried in Heavenly Rest Cemetery in that city.
Sources Consulted:
Biography in William Patrick Burrell and D. E. Johnson, Twenty-Five Years History of the Grand Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers, 1881–1905 (1909), 498–506 (several portraits); Marriage Register, Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; James D. Watkinson, "William Washington Browne and the True Reformers of Richmond, Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97 (1989): 375–398; Abram L. Harris, The Negro as Capitalist: A Study of Banking and Business among American Negroes (1936), 62–74; Burrell, "Labor and Business in Virginia," in Hampton Negro Conference Proceedings (1903): 47–56, and "Negro Life Insurance" and "Colored Anti-Tuberculosis League, Richmond Branch," in Hampton Negro Conference Annual Report 14 (1910): 44–45, 51–57; bank failure and its consequences reported in Richmond Planet, 5 Nov. 1910–8 June 1912, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 23 Apr. 1912, 25 Apr. 1912, 31 May 1912; information provided by New Jersey Historical Society and Newark Public Library; obituaries in Newark Evening News, 21 Mar. 1952, and Newark New Jersey Afro-American (portraits) and Richmond Afro-American, both 29 Mar. 1952.
Photograph in Twenty-Five Years History of the Grand Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by John T. Kneebone.
How to cite this page:
John T. Kneebone, "William Patrick Burrell (1865–1952)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2001 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Burrell_William_Patrick, accessed [today's date]).
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