Charles Clinton Spaulding served as president of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest black-owned insurance company in the United States. Spaulding attended school, earning the equivalent of a modern high-school diploma in 1898. He was then hired as manager of a black-owned cooperative grocery store. After the store’s owners became discouraged about its prospects, they sold their interests in the store in 1899, causing it to collapse and leaving Spaulding $300 in debt. Spaulding became the general manager of North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association, an organization founded by John Merrick and Spaulding’s uncle, Aaron Moore. The Association eventually became North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance, the largest black-owned insurance company in the nation. Spaulding immediately began to recruit agents, mostly among black schoolteachers and ministers, and rapidly expanded Mutual’s market.
In 1921 Charles Spaulding assumed leadership of Mechanics and Farmers Bank, which was an offshoot of North Carolina Mutual. He also headed the Mutual Building and Loan Association and was vice president and chairman of the Bankers Fire Insurance Company and the Southern Fidelity Mutual Insurance Company, respectively. Spaulding became president of North Carolina Mutual in 1923, after the death of his uncle. By the mid-1920s, Mutual and its various satellite enterprises led to Durham, North Carolina being designated the capital of the black middle class.