Commune was supposed to be, first, a predominantly Black utopian society (or at least training ground), and, second, an integrated utopian society whose purpose was to provide opportunities for African Americans to learn communal living while earning enough to buy their freedom and passage to Haiti or Liberia. Unlike the NAEI, Nashoba was not particularly egalitarian and did not encourage Black leadership. While not particularly successful, Nashoba lasted longer than some of Owen’s White socialist utopian communes. Nonetheless, according to DeFilippis, the history of nineteenth-century Black “organized communities” provides the “roots for the emergence of community ownership” and community control in the United States (2004, 38).
Mutual-Aid and Beneficial Societies
Collective practice and leadership among independent African Americans was more evident in the more prevalent and very successful African American mutual-aid and beneficial societies. The majority of early African American cooperative economic activity revolved around benevolent societies, beneficial societies, mutual-aid societies, and, more formally and more commonly, mutual insurance companies. Many of these societies were integrally connected with religious institutions or people with the same religious affiliation, and they established educational, health, social welfare, moral, and economic services for their members. Chief among the activities was care for widows and children, the elderly, and the poor, and provision of burial services.4 Woodson describes a “tendency toward mutual helpfulness” among the enslaved and notes that free Negroes in the South “were well known for their mutual helpfulness.” In addition, “wherever Negroes had their own churches benevolence developed as the handmaiden of religion” (1929, 202).
The purpose of these mutual-aid societies was to “provide people with the basic needs of everyday life—clothing, shelter, and emotional and physical sustenance” (Jones 1985, 127). In addition to social welfare functions, many of the societies promoted temperance and other middle-class and Christian values; but they also protected fugitives and free African Americans from kidnappers (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010, 116). Berry notes that “African Americans had long been in the habit of forming mutual assistance associations, providing help when government refused to help. For African Americans, such mediating institutions historically provided the only available social assistance” (2005, 61). Similarly, Weare contends that mutual aid was a “pragmatic response to social and economic needs. In many cases autonomous Negro societies were organized only after Black leaders were rebuffed when they sought to join existing white groups” (1993, 8).
According to Hine, Hine and Harrold, “the earliest Black community institutions were mutual aid societies” (2010, 116). Du Bois notes their large numbers and wide ramifications by 1907 (1907, 93). Berry calls mutual aid “one component of the broad effort at community care among African Americans, which included secret societies, homes for children, old-age homes, and a flexible family system for individuals throughout the life cycle” (2005, 64). In addition, Black Freemason societies united Black men regionally and were a major social movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010, 117). Fraternities and secret societies were equally plentiful and influential. Woodson observes that “while they were secret in procedure and benevolent in purpose these fraternal agencies offered unusual opportunities for community effort, the promotion of racial consciousness, and the development of leadership” (1929, 205).
Most scholars of this era (Berry 2005; Weare 1993; Pollard 1980; Woodson 1929; Du Bois 1898 and 1907, for example) note the connection between mutual aid and religious activity. As Du Bois observed:
Of the 236 efforts and institutions reported in this inquiry [about practical insurance and benevolence], seventy-nine are churches. Next in importance to churches come the Negro secret societies. . . . Of the organizations reported ninety-two were secret societies—some, branches or imitations of great white societies, some original Negro inventions. . . . There are, however, many Negro organizations whose sole object is to aid and reform. First among these come the beneficial societies. . . . These beneficial organizations have spread until to-day there are many thousands of them in the United States. They are mutual benefit associations and are usually connected with churches. Of such societies twenty-six are returned in this report. (1898, 4–5)
Interestingly, the first independent Black church in the United States, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, was established by the leaders of the second African American mutual-aid society in the country, the Free African Society in Philadelphia. The first official mutual-aid society was organized in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1780 (Hine, Hine and Harrold 2010), followed by the Free African Society (often erroneously believed to be the first), established by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in 1787. Allen and Jones also founded the AME Church in Philadelphia in 1816. Six years earlier, the first African American insurance company, African Insurance Company, was established in Philadelphia (Du Bois 1907, 98). The Negro convention movement also began in Philadelphia, in 1830, and was an important stimulus to the growth of beneficial societies across the nation (Pollard 1980, 231). Here we see the interconnectedness in one city between the different forms of society and help, and between the various institutions that provided them with solidarity and support.
Black mutual-aid and beneficial societies spread rapidly in the early 1800s, especially in the North and in urban areas (Jones 1985, 126; Weare 1993). Although more common in the North, many southern cities, such as New Orleans, Charleston (Berry 2005), and Richmond (Weare 1993), also had these societies. By 1830 there were more than a hundred mutual-aid societies in Philadelphia alone, and about thirty in Baltimore. In 1855, 9,762 African Americans were members of 108 Black mutual-aid societies in Philadelphia (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010, 183). Du Bois (1907) focused much of his research on the various societies in Baltimore.
Du Bois (1898, 19) described the business methods of beneficial societies. A group of people who know each other through their neighborhood or church or other organization join an organization to provide a service or set of services. They agree to pay an initial fee to join and a weekly or monthly fee to keep the common fund operating. A specified portion is paid to any member who needs the service, whether he or she is sick and needs a doctor, hospitalization, an income while convalescing, or needs to be buried or needs food or clothing. Sometimes other members donate their services instead of, or in addition to, funds from the organization’s treasury. Some societies hire their own doctor or nurse to attend to members’ health needs (Berkeley 1985). According to Pollard, these societies paid death benefits of between $10 and $20, and sick benefits from $1 to $3, each on premiums of 25 cents on average (1980, 231). Weare similarly records that premiums ranged from 25 to 37 cents per month and that benefits ranged from $1.50 to $3 per week for sickness and $10 to $20 for death claims (1993, 9). Many families belonged to two or more aid societies in order to increase their sick benefits.
Although the first mutual-aid societies were male only or dominated by men, by the 1790s women had established their own mutual-aid and beneficial societies (Berkeley 1985; Jones 1985; Lerner 1974; Boylan 1984). Berkeley contends that “black women were often in the vanguard in founding and sustaining autonomous organizations designed specifically to improve social conditions within their respective communities. . . . In creating autonomous institutions to solve the problems caused by inadequate health care services, substandard housing, economic deprivation, and segregated schools, black women served notice that they felt a special responsibility to provide social welfare programs for their communities” (1985, 184). Black women established day nurseries, orphanages, homes for the aged and infirm, hospitals, cemeteries, night schools, and scholarship funds (Berkeley 1985; Jones 1985; Lerner 1974). They pooled “meager resources,” sponsored fund-raisers, solicited voluntary contributions (Berkeley 1985, 85), and used modest dues that even the “poorest women managed to contribute” to meet vital social welfare needs (Jones 1985). Women’s mutual-aid societies proliferated and were sometimes more numerous than all-male or men-oriented ones, and became influential in the Black community throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s. “In 1793 Philadelphia’s Female Benevolent Society of St. Thomas took over the welfare functions of the city’s Free African Society” (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010, 116). This
