Reviewed by: Lending Power: How Self-Help Credit Union Turned Small-Time Loans into Big-Time Change by Howard E. Covington Jr. Alec Hickmott Lending Power: How Self-Help Credit Union Turned Small-Time Loans into Big-Time Change. By Howard E. Covington Jr. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 211. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-6969-1.) In Lending Power: How Self-Help Credit Union Turned Small-Time Loans into Big-Time Change, Howard E. Covington Jr. tells a remarkable story. Beginning with a 1983 bake sale that raised seventy-seven dollars, Self-Help Credit Union grew into a major institutional force that supplied thousands of loans to low-income families and predicted the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. The story of Self-Help and its founder and driving force, Martin Daniel Eakes, is a history worth telling, and Covington does so ably. The book is also timely. Covington’s work dovetails with emergent scholarship that has sought to link the history of race and social movements to the history of American finance and banking, recently exemplified by the work of Mehrsa Baradaran and Shennette Garrett-Scott, among others. Lending Power is also a worthwhile contribution to the history of antipoverty work in North Carolina, a state that has functioned as a laboratory for such efforts from the 1960s onward. Beginning in the early 1980s, Self-Help’s work was animated by a commitment to bring low-income Americans into the orbit of American finance. Principally, Self-Help sought to extend mortgages to families who had been denied loans by established lenders. Covington also details Eakes’s lobbying efforts to enact regulations against the predatory lending practices that emerged in an era of increasing deregulation, and he explains how the creation of a policy shop (the Center for Responsible Lending) gave the organization an important voice in both state and national discussions about the reform of banking law and the financial system. In the 2000s, Covington shows, the center not only anticipated the 2008 financial crisis but also was influential in the debates about financial regulation and consumer protection that followed. While effective as a narrative that combines a history of Self-Help’s evolution with clear explanations of complex financial processes and mechanisms, Lending Power at times lacks explanatory power. Most important, Covington [End Page 966] does not spend much time providing political, intellectual, or economic context for the work of Self-Help or Eakes. This is in part a function of the sources that the account relies on, which are largely interviews conducted by the author. The core of Eakes’s vision, Covington contends, was a belief “that democracy’s very survival depends on a level playing field for all in the economic marketplace” (p. 4). Though it is hard to contest the idea that “the spirit of the 1960s was fresh and alive” in the work of Eakes and Self-Help, Covington could have assisted readers with a more precise articulation of the ways the conservatism of the Ronald Reagan administration reshaped the intellectual, political, and ideological horizons of American social movements as they became increasingly institutionalized (p. 20). Nonetheless, Lending Power is a lucid history of an organization that was, in many respects, pathbreaking in its recognition of the structural conditions that drive what social scientists have now belatedly recognized as a persistent racial wealth gap. Covington illustrates this point in a memorable juxtaposition of Eakes and Angelo Mozilo, the chief executive officer of Countrywide, who argued publicly that his mortgages were sold as a means of “increasing homeownership opportunities for those who have been traditionally left behind” (p. 117). But it was Countrywide’s toxic subprime mortgages—extended on predatory terms, a world removed from those extended by Self-Help to low-income borrowers—that played a significant role in once again expanding the racial wealth gap. Covington’s account of an alternative model of banking, credit, and economic empowerment thus suggests both the historical and the political imperatives of excavating the voices who have long occupied the sidelines of debates about the organization of American capitalism. In this regard, Lending Power is an important intervention. Alec Hickmott Amherst...