As a child, Martie Hamilton — who legally changed her middle name to North and goes by Martie North professionally — never thought about what she would do as an adult.
“When people say, ‘Oh when I was a little girl I saw myself doing X, Y and Z” — [I] didn’t have that,” she says. “I go with, I guess the flow, because it has just worked for me in that way. Any time I tried to … go in a different direction, it just didn’t work. It’s kind of just been like nope, sit still and wait … and God will present what you’re supposed to do next.”
Her current career was revealed to her. But the road to the position was circuitous.
As senior vice president and director of community development/Community Reinvestment Act regulatory and consumer affairs for Simmons Bank, Hamilton serves as its Regulation BB community reinvestment act officer. CRA is a federal law enacted to encourage banks to meet the credit needs of all communities, including low- and moderate-income ones. Hamilton develops the bank’s CRA strategy and enacts programs and products that accomplish this objective.
“I enjoy creating ways to empower people to improve their lives,” Hamilton says. “I love serving as a bridge between community engagement and financial services and products. It is amazing to know that I have been able to help thousands of people and they have no idea how that product or service was made possible.”
Lyn Haralson, a financial education program analyst and member of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, describes Hamilton as a “fierce advocate,” citing her having driven an initiative to elevate the training and certification of the state’s affordable-housing nonprofits.
“Martie is an energetic champion for people of color. She works to build understanding and overcome biases to build communities. Martie is passionate about everything in which she is involved,” Haralson says.
Some might say that Hamilton, 50, got that energy from her mother.
The daughter of Jacob Milligan and the late Jacqueline Milligan, Hamilton grew up in Searcy.
“I always say, ‘Yes, there are black people in White County,’” she says. “They’ve been there over 100 years. I used to get that all the time — that look . And I’d go, ‘There are black people in Searcy.’”
Hamilton, an only child, was the first in her immediate family to go to a racially integrated school. And Jacqueline Milligan was going to be sure her daughter didn’t suffer during the experience.
Hamilton shares a story about her mother storming into the principal’s office at Hamilton’s elementary school. “She had a presence about her,” Hamilton says. “She stormed in there, and she told [the principal] that if they mistreated me she was going to burn the school down. They put that in my record.”
And there it remained.
“I had a few moments during my public education where my mother would call and say, ‘Do I need to come up to the school?’ And it was as if they looked in the file and they were like, ‘Oh no, ma’am. You don’t have to come. We’ve worked it out.’ And I’m like, ‘What is going on?’ And then I heard the story and I was like, ‘Oh, I get it now.’”
Hamilton is a graduate of Searcy High School, where she played clarinet and was on flag line in the marching band. She remembers, with a chuckle, the time a student teacher was serving in the capacity of band director. “You know band directors can be really animated [and] passionate about stuff. We were on a drill in the summer, and … he decided he was going to yell something at me.
“I just turned around and I said, ‘Apparently, you haven’t read the file.’”
Yes, that file. She doesn’t know whether the teacher was told about the file, but she does know that he never yelled at her again.
Hamilton also participated in various other school clubs and was “heavily” involved with her childhood family church, Bethlehem Baptist. “I call myself P.K. [Preacher’s Kid] Adjacent,” she says. Her great-grandmother, Rosie Clemons, was a mother of the church. Her grandmother Bobbie Langford was on the usher board. Her mother ran the youth programs and the choirs. “I had to be involved in anything and everything that I was told to be involved in.” She was her mother’s assistant and secretary.
THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD
It was a bachelor of science in dietetics, a far cry from banking, that Hamilton went on to earn from Harding University in Searcy. Her first postgraduate job was in a hospital in Atlanta.
“What I discovered during that experience is, I gross out way too easily,” Hamilton says. “I absolutely hated going into the hospital setting every day.”
Wondering what she was going to do next, Hamilton returned to Arkansas in need of a job. She turned to a temporary employment agency.
Her first assignment was at United Technologies Carrier, an air handling unit manufacturing plant. She was one of two females, and the only black person in the engineering department, tasked with helping to create engineering tables for the production floor. When the company closed the Arkansas plant and moved to Tennessee, Hamilton headed back to the temporary employment agency and was sent to work in the human resources department at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. The job showed no promise of turning into a permanent position, so Hamilton’s next stop, via the temp agency, was Boatmen’s Bank. She worked at Boatmen’s after it became NationsBank, departing before it became Bank of America. She also worked for Mercantile Bank, which later became Firstar Bank (now US Bank). Bank of the Ozarks, now known as Bank OZK, was her last stop before Simmons.
Hamilton’s first banking job was in the trust department at Boatmen’s.
“I was in trust 30 days and thought, ‘This is the most boring job I could ever have.’ So I started looking for something else in the bank. [I] got a chance to move into a startup small-business department. Had probably one of my best bosses, ever — Clyde Henderson.”
Hamilton started off as an administrative assistant in the new department. Until then, she says, she didn’t know anything about banking “other than …. you go deposit checks and withdraw money. I was introduced to a lot of different areas of the bank, and had to figure out a bunch.”
She was eventually recruited to another administrative assistant job, one that exposed her to another aspect of banking. Then her job was eliminated.
During the time leading up to the job elimination, bank management officials “were really, really, really focused on career paths,” Hamilton says. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what I want to do. Let me think about it.’ When other employees began getting pink-slips, she was called in.
“They said, ‘You are such a talented and good worker, we don’t want to lose you. Even though your job is being eliminated, we still want you to show up as usual and sit at your desk until we figure out what to do with you.’”
For several weeks, Hamilton did just that. Finally presented with some options, she decided to go into mortgage lending. “We did not have a high incidence of home ownership in my family, so I [didn’t] know anything about buying a house,” she recalls. Working as a CRA mortgage lender, she knuckled down and learned.
HEADING TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
Hamilton credits an associate, Linda F. Smith, for introducing her to the realm of affordable housing and community development, and the Community Reinvestment Act, in 1999-2000. “I always think [that] people are placed in your life for a reason. And I think hers was to push me in a particular direction that I didn’t even know existed.”
Hamilton also credits all her previous jobs for helping prepare her for her current one. “Not having a background in a thing has never stopped me from jumping, both feet into the fire, and figuring it out … figuring out how to excel.”
She did take a break from her banking career due to all of the mergers and accompanying job uncertainty. “I jumped over to the nonprofit sector, looking for stability” and ran the Argenta Neighborworks Home Ownership Center in North Little Rock. After almost three years there, she was recruited by Bank of the Ozarks, due to her having done so well with helping Argenta Neighborworks clients get financing. Bank of the Ozarks was where she went into the regulatory arm of banking for the first time.
“So, a girl with a dietetics degree has been in banking regulatory space,” Hamilton says. “Absolutely no correlation whatsoever.”
Drew Harper, managing director, wholesale deposits group for Bank OZK, has known Hamilton for two decades and swears by her work ethic.
“She is always prepared, driven, and laser-focused,” Harper says. “If Martie is involved in a project or has taken a position on a topic, she has done her homework.”
In addition, Hamilton ran her own consulting business, working with nonprofit organizations. For five years, she worked full time and was self-employed, working 52 weeks out of the year. Eventually, she was recruited by Simmons.
BUSY VOLUNTEER
Hamilton’s community-related work goes far beyond her 9-to-5 role.
Even though she grew up only an hour from Arkansas’ capital city, “I didn’t know diddly-squat about Ninth Street or anything in Little Rock,” she confesses. “Of course I heard [about] Central High,” but that was about it.
This was one of the reasons she became a founding member with Friends of Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, a group providing support to the black history museum located on Little Rock’s historic Ninth Street. Hamilton currently serves as Friends board chairwoman.
“I saw a video and I was learning all kinds of stuff I didn’t know,” Hamilton says. “It was all brand-new information to me in 2004.
“Tamika Edwards reached out to me about Mosaic Templars. I was like, ‘What the heck is a Mosaic Templar?’ … She was like, ‘You need to come on and get involved; we’re going to be doing this, that and the other.’”
Edwards gave Hamilton the educational DVD to watch. “I was just blown away and I said, ‘I’ve got to be involved.’”
Edwards, executive director of the Social Justice Institute at Philander Smith College, adores Hamilton, “or, as I call her, ‘Mar-tay.’”
“She is wise, funny, fashionable and supportive,” Edwards says. “As a sister-friend, I often go to her for all sorts of advice and assistance. She is especially knowledgeable about nonprofit governance and infrastructure. … She has a heart of gold and uses her skills and talent to help others.”
Hamilton’s other current nonprofit affiliations: the Arkansas Coalition of Housing for Neighborhood Growth and Empowerment, of which she’s founder and board chairwoman; Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, of which she’s board secretary; the University District Development Corporation, of which she serves on the board; Breakthrough Solutions, a program of the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service, Advisory Council; the City of Little Rock Opportunity Zone Task Force, which she co-chairs; Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc.; and the American Banker’s Association Community Reinvestment Act Working Group. In addition, she lectures on unconscious bias and cultural competency.
Otherwise, she enjoys life with her husband, Scott Hamilton, with whom she recently celebrated “what we call nine and five,” she says. “We met in 2011 and we married in 2015. Literally, it’s May 22 and May 23.”
She also cherishes time with friends such as Cherie Abston, chief deputy of the Pulaski Circuit and County Court. Abston praises her friend’s dedication to voluntarism and ability to get friends involved in volunteer projects, such as the Mosaic Templars benefit Hamilton chaired a few years ago featuring vocalist Ramsey Lewis.
“She is that loving friend who is always a phone call away,” Abston says.
It’s ironic that Hamilton considers herself an “underachiever” who hasn’t accomplished so much in life.
“I take this from Iyanla [Vanzandt, celebrity life coach and author]: What am I supposed to learn in this experience … and then how can you apply what you learned going forward? Now, I’m at a place where you share those lessons with those that are coming up behind you.”
SELF PORTRAIT
Martie Hamilton
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Nov. 28, 1969, Little Rock Air Force Base, Jacksonville
FANTASY DINNER GUESTS: President Barack and Michelle Obama; my mom, Jacqueline Milligan; my grandmother, Bobbie Langford; my great-grandmother, Rosie Clemons; my husband, Scott Hamilton; Tim Wise [activist and writer]; Jane Elliott [anti-racist advocate/educator] and Michael Eric Dyson [professor and author].
MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW: I am very goofy and I love to laugh and dance.
MY BIGGEST GUILTY PLEASURES: T.J.Maxx and reality TV
NOTABLE BOOKS I’VE READ: Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow, also by Henry Louis Gates; The Forgotten Americans: An Economic Agenda for a Divided Nation by Isabel Sawhill
A COMMON PIECE OF ADVICE I GIVE TO YOUNG PEOPLE/ MENTEES: 1. No one owes you anything. You have to work for it. 2. Focus on being the best version of you. 3. There is no one on the planet that is better than you. They may have higher titles and powerful positions, but that does not make them better than you. 4. You are enough.
MY HOBBIES: Shopping; engaging in cultural competency-related activities
ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: Fortitudinous