been members of community-level benevolent organizations. This experience “brought to [cooperative economic efforts] some skills that were very useful to the organization” (Prejean 1992, 15). Some mutual-aid organizations transitioned into formal businesses, particularly mutual insurance companies, which were the earliest of the formal cooperatives.
FROM ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE TO POLITICAL ADVOCACY
Cooperation and the Nineteenth-Century Black Populist Movement
Generation after generation, ethnic and class alliances arose in the [Delta] region with the aim of expanding social and economic democracy, only to be ignored, dismissed, and defeated. These defeats were followed by arrogant attempts to purge such heroic movements from both historical texts and popular memory. Yet even in defeat these movements transformed the policies of the plantation bloc and informed daily life, community-building activities, and subsequent movements.
—WOODS (1998, 4)
The story of the African American cooperative movement in the United States is also a story of unionization, organized labor’s early efforts at cooperative development, and populism. The Cooperative Workers of America and the Knights of Labor, integrated unions operating in the South, supported small farmers, laborers, and the grassroots Black rural sector (Ali 2003, 44–45). The Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-operative Union continued their legacy, challenging White supremacy and establishing cooperatives in a hostile environment. In the late nineteenth century, the cooperative movement was part of the populist movement for the rights of small farmers and laborers, working for political power, economic survival, and control over production.
The Knights of Labor
According to Steve Leikin, the Knights of Labor (KOL) was the American organization that came closest to replicating the experience of European cooperative movements, starting immediately after the Civil War years, an era in which the American Federation of Labor specifically rejected cooperatives as a strategy of labor reform (1999, 2). The cooperative movement in the United States was not closely aligned with organized labor, as in Europe, although there were exceptions, including advocacy, on the part of some labor unions, for worker, consumer, and producer cooperatives, such as cooperatively owned mills, factories, craft production, and retail stores. In 1836, for example, the National Trades Union, after prolonged struggles with employers, recommended cooperation as a solution to strikes and the dilution of craft skills (6), sponsoring about eighteen production cooperatives; and in the 1840s, the associationist movement produced twenty-two industrial cooperatives (Curl 2009, 4). Cooperative ideals revived in the 1860s, immediately after the Civil War.
Rochdale cooperatives had emerged by 1863 and began to attract supporters within the American labor movement.1 Hundreds of cooperatives had been launched in the United States by the early 1870s (Curl 2009; see also Leikin 1999). The Iron Molders union, for example, organized cooperative foundries in Troy, New York, and Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1866. The National Labor Union (NLU), the first national union federation in the country, “threw all its weight behind the cooperative movement” in the late 1860s, in addition to promoting the eight-hour day, rights for women, and Black and White labor solidarity (Curl 2009, 65). The NLU advocated that all states should pass cooperative incorporation laws, and organized more than 180 production cooperatives between the late 1860s and the 1870s. The Sovereigns of Industry, a “reform organization” of industrial workers (1874–79), began advocating for cooperative stores in its more than three hundred local chapters across the Northeast and midwestern and central United States (Leikin 1999, 9; Curl 2009, 80–81). A decade later, the Knights of Labor supplanted the Sovereigns of Industry and operated cooperatives from their local chapters. By the 1880s, 334 worker cooperatives had been organized in the United States.2 Two hundred were part of a chain of industrial cooperatives organized by the Knights of Labor between 1886 and 1888 (Curl 2009, 4). The KOL envisioned widespread adoption of economic democracy and the development of a “cooperative commonwealth.” Leikin notes that at least five hundred cooperative workshops and factories opened in the twenty-five years following the Civil War (1999, 10). KOL cooperatives were concentrated in the East and Midwest. Most were mines, foundries, mills, and factories making barrels, clothes, shoes, and soap, but KOL cooperatives also included printers, laundries, furniture makers, potters, and lumberjacks (Curl 2009, 92). In Virginia, KOL locals organized a cooperative building, a soap factory, and an underwear factory (Rachleff 2012). Products made in KOL cooperatives carried the KOL label. African American members of the KOL operated a cooperative cotton gin in Stewart’s Station, Alabama, and built cooperative villages near Birmingham (Curl 2009, 101).
The KOL achieved its greatest victory in 1885, when it won union representation against the Union Pacific Railroad. At its height, the KOL was the largest labor organization in the world, with almost one million members (Curl 2009, 4, 102). It was also one of the few racially integrated unions. According to Sidney Kessler, “tens of thousands of Negroes” who had never been in the labor movement before joined the KOL in the 1880s. In 1886 there were an estimated sixty thousand African Americans in the Knights of Labor, although some estimate that by 1887 there were closer to ninety or ninety-five thousand. “More than any other union of the eighteen eighties, the Knights of Labor realized that the self-interest of its white members was in the organization of Negro Labor” (Kessler 1952, 272, 275).
An example of the way in which Blacks and Whites worked together in the KOL can be seen in Richmond, Virginia, where small KOL locals began forming in 1881 on the basis of workplace, trade, neighborhood, or fraternal or mutual-aid ties. White and Black workers organized separate locals, and in 1884 and early 1885 established local district assemblies, which combined the small locals. Twelve African American locals organized District Assembly 92; six weeks later, in March 1885, eleven White locals organized District Assembly 84. District Assembly 92 had more than five hundred members and was the first African American KOL district assembly in the United States, according to Rachleff (2012). An integrated KOL campaign in Richmond organized the Workingmen’s Reform Party, which won control of the municipal government in 1886, electing Black candidates. This new administration in Richmond proceeded to build a new city hall with a racially integrated, unionized local workforce. This was actually a biracial coalition of men and women laborers, with Black and White members organizing separately for a linked campaign with shared goals (Rachleff 2012, 34). As significant as the integrated coalition was, the gender equality was equally remarkable, especially given that women could not vote. Women participated in the KOL’s campaigns and boycotts (often as leaders), and in the cooperatives as workers and consumers.
A major issue for the Richmond Knights of Labor was the construction of the new city hall—the old one had been burned down by the Confederate government as it abandoned Richmond in April 1865. In the early 1880s, the reigning conservative White city government solicited bids for the reconstruction of the building. In 1885 the KOL submitted a petition requesting that the hall be built with local materials by local workers employed directly by the city, who would be paid union wages and work eight-hour days. The petition also specified that all jobs, skilled as well as unskilled, should “be open to the employment of ‘colored’ workers” (Rachleff 2012, 35). This was of particular concern because the city had been contracting with workers from the Virginia State Penitentiary and using convict labor. KOL coopers in Virginia were skilled workers and among the most racially integrated of the trades. In the early 1880s the penitentiary housed a mechanized barrel factory within its walls and used convicts to make the barrels. This had a large negative impact on the local Black and White coopers, and the two KOL district assemblies in Virginia mounted a campaign to close the factory. Rachleff notes that not only was the strategy—boycotts, petitions, and electing KOL members to city government—successful, but it also transformed “their
