[1][3] The former North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company building is located in downtown Durham, on the northside of West Parrish Street in the area known as Black Wall Street.

It is a six-story brick building, three bays wide, with a flat roof.

Pilasters rise between and outside the first floor bays to a stone course in which the words "Merchants and Farmers Bank" are incised.

[3] The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company was founded in 1898 by a group of seven African-American men, of whom two, John Merrick and Dr. Aaron Moore, survived in the business after one year.

Moore's nephew, Charles Clinton Spaulding, took charge of the business in 1900, and it thereafter grew rapidly, becoming by 1910 the nation's largest firm owned by African-Americans.