September 2026

Editor’s Note: Norah O’Donnell is a senior correspondent for CBS News, Co-Host of CBS Mornings and a correspondent for 60 Minutes. She recently authored a collection of stories about American women from 1776 to today who changed the course of history, We the Women: The Hidden Heroes Who Shaped America, in which a version of this essay appeared.

On November 2, 1903, in the heart of the former capital of the Confederacy, a Black woman did the unthinkable: She opened a bank – and not just any bank but one that sparked a movement of Black economic empowerment. 

A small, but growing, coterie of constitutional scholars has been asking how it is that one of the framers most responsible for both the broad shape of the Constitution and the document’s small details — some petty, some consequential — is not better remembered?