In a recent article, Charles Mills and Katrin Flikschuh ask us to consider what we mean when we speak of racial justice. “‘Racial justice’”, they point out, “is a term widely used in everyday discourse, but little explored in philosophy”. In this paper, I ask what we mean when we speak of racial justice in the context of financial institutions and financial markets. Rather than exploring the meaning of racial justice by establishing how contemporary political philosophy can be brought to bear on it, I show how a particular understanding of racial justice emerged historically at the intersection of emerging financial practices and racial ideology. To do so, I turn to one of the earliest U.S. American struggles over racial practices by financial institutions in the post-Emancipation era: the contestation of discriminatory practices by life insurance companies. Between 1884 and 1895, Massachusetts, Ohio, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Minnesota passed legislation that "prohibited discrimination against persons of color by life insurance companies". I critically examine the ways in which the commodification of risk in the life insurance market became entangled with narratives of racial difference and how African American activists sought to contest such discriminatory practices. I argue that the anti-discrimination legislation evinced a narrow conception of state action in pursuit of racial justice, and constituted a significant narrowing of the political agenda of some of its more radical African American supporters, such as Thomas Fortune and McCants Stewart.