and villages organized by fugitives from enslavement were used “as bases for guerrilla raids on the slavers. These ‘maroon’ outlaw communes, many with both Black and Indian members, appeared wherever slavery spread” (Curl 1980, 4). Like Du Bois, Curl notes that religious gatherings were also mutual-aid gatherings and often served as planning meetings for revolts and escapes. For Du Bois, religious camaraderie was the basis for African American economic cooperation, and churches, secret societies, and mutual-aid societies among enslaved and free alike created the beginnings of economic cooperation. In terms of official organization, mutual-aid societies actually predate independent African American churches (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010), but not Black religious activity. However, more important than what came first are the many ways in which African Americans used cooperation to survive enslavement, gain freedom, and advance economically.
Black Communities or Communes and Utopian Ideals
Runaways from enslavement formed their own communities where they eluded or fought off bounty hunters, took on the identity of Maroons, and lived collective existences in relative isolation. Du Bois notes that the African American “spirit of revolt” used cooperation in the form of insurrection to establish “widespread organization for the rescue of fugitive slaves.” This in turn developed, in both the North and the South, into “various co-operative efforts toward economic emancipation and land buying,” and those efforts led to cooperative businesses, building-and-loan associations, and trade unions (1907, 26).
In addition, abolitionists and abolitionist societies deliberately established Negro-organized communities and communes to house freed African Americans and to teach them how to live as free people, earn a living and an education, and run their own communities. They raised money and often managed these communal farms. These communities created spaces of isolation and independence from racism, used mutual aid and assistance, and pooled Black and White resources until African Americans could manage on their own. While not exactly centers of Black self-help (because African Americans were so dependent on White benefactors), they are early examples of African American communalism. Such communities were scattered throughout the American Midwest—in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin—and southern Ontario, Canada (DeFilippis 2004, 38; Pease and Pease 1963). The first communities were recorded in 1830 and were gone by the end of the Civil War, with emancipation. Weare (1993) notes that Negro-led societies were organized only after White groups refused to allow Black leaders to join them.
While most of the successful communes were located in Canada, some took root in the United States. The Wilberforce Colony in Ontario was nearly self-sustaining in 1831. Black inhabitants owned their own sawmill and one hundred head of cattle, as well as pigs and horses. They had a system of schools for their children that were so successful that neighboring Whites sent their own children there (Pease and Pease 1963, 50). However, the families remained poor, their homes were tiny and not well kept up, and they spent time and money on “endless controversies and lawsuits with their U.S. agent” (51). The Dawn Settlement near Dresden, Ontario, another Black community, developed around the British-American Institute. Josiah Henson, a fugitive from enslavement in the United States, was one of the founders and an early leader. Founded in 1837, the first tract of land, of two hundred acres, was bought in 1841 (64). In December 1842 the manual-labor school opened. The community developed to serve the school and operated “formally, and informally, as a co-operative unit in maintaining it” (65). By the early 1850s roughly five hundred African Americans/Canadians owned about fifteen hundred acres, separate from the three hundred acres belonging to the institute. Inhabitants raised corn, wheat, oats, and tobacco, and operated a sawmill, a gristmill, a rope factory, and a brickyard.
The Northampton Association of Education and Industry
The Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI) was a utopian community and short-lived integrated commune in western Massachusetts. Among its inhabitants were Sojourner Truth, a washerwoman, formerly enslaved, who became an outspoken abolitionist and feminist, famous for her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, and David Ruggles, an African American printer and leader of the Underground Railroad, and an advocate of hydrotherapy (by 1845 he had established a water-cure hospital in the area, one of the first in the country). The NAEI was established in 1842 in the town of Florence (outside Northampton) as an intentional utopian community by abolitionists and social reformers (Historic Northampton n.d.). They established a community around a communally owned and operated silk mill. Milling of silk was chosen in part because the “equal and classless” silkworm is a symbol of democracy. The NAEI was a predominantly White organization that believed in the possibility of a socially, politically, and economically egalitarian society. It operated as an economic commune, and education was an integral component of the collective’s aim to create a democratic and socially responsible society. The founders felt that everyone could do any job and encouraged members to learn silk milling, housekeeping, and social justice work “by doing”—by engaging in the work together, fostering active participation by all, and creating an egalitarian work environment. Members worked and studied together six days a week. On Sunday morning they worshipped, and Sunday afternoons were set aside for free discussions and debates about world issues as well as commune policies (Collaborative for Educational Services 2009b).
Three or four African Americans were associated with the NAEI. The abolitionists Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and David Ruggles were active participants and the most famous of the NAEI’s Black members. The association accepted (harbored) fugitives from enslavement as part of its abolitionist and social justice mission (Collaborative for Educational Services 2009a).
Frederick Douglass was a fugitive from enslavement, an abolitionist, a newspaper editor, and a shipbuilder by trade who became an advisor to presidents and the first African American recorder of deeds in the District of Columbia after the Civil War. Although Douglass started his association with the NAEI at its beginnings in 1842, and would stop there on his way to giving abolitionist lectures in New England, he never lived there. Douglass visited several times, engaged in debates there, and gave speeches at the commune. He wrote about his experience with the NAEI in 1895, noting that its goals were to “change and improve conditions of human existence; to liberate mankind from the bondage of time-worn custom; to curb and fix limits to individual selfishness; to diffuse wealth among the lowly; to banish poverty; to harmonize conflicting interests, and to promote the happiness of mankind generally” (1895, 129). Douglass was struck by the sense of liberty and equality he felt among the group: “The place and the people struck me as the most democratic I had ever met. It was a place to extinguish all aristocratic pretensions. There was no high, no low, no masters, no servants, no white, and no black. I, however, felt myself in very high society” (130). The NAEI was the only place Douglass had ever been in the United States where he felt that his color was not used against him. “My impressions of the Community,” he wrote, “are not only the impressions of a stranger, but those of a fugitive slave to whom at that time even Massachusetts opposed a harsh and repellant side. The cordial reception I met with at Florence, was, therefore, much enhanced by its contrast with many other places in that commonwealth. Here, at least, neither my color nor my condition was counted against me” (130). Douglass also mentioned meeting David Ruggles and Sojourner Truth there, and noted how well the community treated and protected them.
Sojourner Truth joined the NAEI in 1843 and lived there for about two years. It was there that she met William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass, and Wendell Phillips, and afterward became an abolitionist and women’s rights activist and speaker. The commune elected Truth head of laundry, where she supervised White members of the collective, an unheard-of arrangement at the time (Collaborative for Educational Services 2009b). Truth recalled that the NAEI, more than anywhere else she had ever lived, provided “equality of feeling,” “liberty of thought and speech,” and “largeness of soul” (Historic Northampton n.d.), in spite of difficult living conditions. Truth described her first thoughts about the NAEI:
She did not fall in love at first sight with the Northampton Association, for she arrived there at a time when appearances did not correspond with the ideas of associationists, as they had been spread out in their writings;
