example, convened a statewide Black political convention in October 1885, calling for an end to convict labor and a suspension of support for the Republican Party if it did not agree to this plan.
The Role of Women in Early Union Co-ops
The early union cooperatives were often relatively conservative politically and limited the rights and mobility of women and unskilled workers in their operation and decision making (Leikin 1999, 16). As women entered the labor movement, they began to challenge the gender bias of established cooperative values. Curl notes that co-op women attempted to incorporate “feminine” ideals of mutual aid and volunteerism as central to their cooperative visions (2009, 17). Black women, who had a long and impressive history in the mutual-aid movement, pursued the same goal, and brought time-honored strategies and skills to African American cooperatives. In 1886, Leonora Barry was elected head of the new department of women’s work at the KOL convention (101). Barry was the first female professional labor organizer in U.S. history, and supported the KOL’s vision of cooperative development.3 Women members of the KOL set up cooperative garment factories in Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapolis.
The Legacy of the Knights of Labor
The Knights of Labor connected workplace issues and labor rights with local, state, and federal policies, and was active in politics and mutual aid as well as economic development. The KOL connected and built upon earlier activities and organizations, and encouraged and promoted women’s and African American involvement. Black members were known for their militancy, and were eventually forced underground in the face of antiunion and racist intimidation and violence (Ali 2003). Many militant White members also went underground in the face of violent opposition from conservatives and the corporate sector (Curl 2009). After the famous Haymarket strike of 1886 in Chicago, the decline of the Knights of Labor was felt most strongly among the cooperatives. As Curl observes, “The entire economic system came down hard on the Knight cooperatives: railroads refused to haul their products; manufacturers refused to sell them needed machinery; wholesalers refused them raw materials and supplies; banks wouldn’t lend” (2009, 106). Most of the cooperatives were forced to close by the end of 1888. The Knights of Labor led a movement that tore through the country, mostly the South. It had a significant impact but then went underground and resurfaced in other forms.
The Cooperative Workers of America
In South Carolina, the Cooperative Workers of America (CWA) built on the foundation laid by the Knights of Labor. Hiram F. Hoover (or Hover), a former KOL member in North Carolina, was president and chief organizer of the CWA. Much of the leadership of the CWA in South Carolina was African American. Most were landless farm laborers with large families. The Hoover movement was strongest where cotton was important and the Black population was highest. Here again, women were admitted with equal status to men (Ali 2003, 62; Baker 1999, 284, 270).
The CWA focused on starting cooperative stores and a free cooperative school system, and addressed issues of wages, work conditions, and electoral reform. The organization’s goal was to strengthen the position of workers, especially Black workers, by decreasing their dependence on the credit system. The CWA used Black organizers (though Hoover was White) and connected the movement to Black Baptist and Methodist churches, union leagues, Black fraternal orders, and other mutual-benefit societies that continued after Reconstruction and often met in secret for protection. As with other African American movements, a strong connection to mutual-benefit societies was important (Ali 2003, 63; Baker 1999, 284, 264).
Locals assembled in clubs, where they studied the organization’s constitution. The initiation fee was fifty-five cents, and for another dollar a member could contribute to the establishment of a cooperative store “where all the members could trade and buy at wholesale rates” (Baker 1999, 264). One noted CWA attempt to establish a cooperative store was unsuccessful because of lack of funds, a shortage of time, and insufficient membership (Ali 2003, 64; Baker 1999, 285). The CWA advanced a progressive platform that included repeal of the poll tax and of all unjust laws against labor, weekly wage guarantees, and “implementation of a free cooperative school system” (Ali 2003, 65). According to Ali, White attempts at infiltration of the CWA failed, but “terroristic suppression” was successful in many areas, especially after rumors of a strike. Also, differences within the Black community led to the organization’s demise after a vigilante attack in the CWA stronghold of Fairview, South Carolina, in early July 1887 (Baker 1999, 279, 282, 283, 285).
The Populist Movement
The populist movement developed out of the experiences—including the failures—of the early unions and the growing National Farmers Alliance in the late 1880s, as well as other grassroots farmers’ movements such as the Patrons of Husbandry, better known as the Grange, in the 1870s. In 1887, the three-million-strong Farmers Alliance opened its first cooperative, intended to be part of a network of organized agricultural cooperatives in an extensive cooperative economic system (Curl 2009, 5). The Farmers Alliance in South Carolina, for example, arrived in that state “only a few months after the demise of the CWA [in 1887, and] also centered its efforts on cooperation. The Farmers’ Alliance, however, ‘whose members were primarily landowning farmers,’ had far more resources upon which to draw than did the rural, black day-laborers who made up the bulk of the membership of the CWA” (Baker 1999, 280). In the face of rising costs, falling prices, and rural isolation, White and Black farmers in the South in the late 1880s were joining farmers’ fraternal organizations such as the Grange, the Agricultural Wheels, state farmers’ unions, and the Southern Farmers’ Alliance. The Southern Farmers’ Alliance emerged as the most significant agricultural organization in the South, but it did not accept Negro membership and at best promoted separate Black chapters (Reynolds 2002). African Americans formed their own organization, the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-operative Union (CFNACU), which worked with the Southern Farmers’ Alliance but remained a separate organization.
There were disparate Black agrarian groups before the CFNACU, such as the Colored Farmers Association in Texas (mid-1870s), the Colored Grange of Tennessee (1880), and the Negro Alliance of Arkansas (1882) (Ali 2003). The Mississippi Union Leagues were also “hatcheries of radical economic experiments” (Woods 2007, 55). The Colored Agricultural Wheels expressed Black populism in the mid-1880s. “Colored Wheels were non-partisan agrarian groups that focused on economic cooperation while pressing for economic and political reforms,” according to Ali, and by the late 1880s were spreading in Alabama and Tennessee as well as Arkansas (2003, 45).
According to Berry, in the 1880s, depressed economic conditions for poor farmers led them to join radical agrarian organizations (2005, 26–27). Radicals preached solidarity for poor Black and White farmers. The Populist Party tried to protect African Americans to ensure the equal application of voting procedures in 1892. Democrats forced African Americans who worked for them to vote Democratic and used riots and murder to maintain political power. “The Populists feared that they would not always be able to control African Americans if they were permitted to behave as allies and not subordinates, and they also feared Democratic control of black voters and efforts to disfranchise poor whites. Poor whites, the planter class, and industrialists joined together in forcing African Americans out of the political arena in the 1890s” (Berry 2005, 27). Similarly, Ali observes that “the inherent conflict between the poor African American agrarian base of black Populism (drawn from the approximately 92% of the rural southern black population that was virtually landless) and the relatively affluent white leadership of the Populist movement would continue into the early 1890s” (2003, 56–57). Violence and intimidation were frequently used to suppress the growth of Black populism, as the movement spearheaded plantation strikes.
Woods describes this period as one in which African Americans wanted to dismantle the plantation regime, establish self-governing communities, and become landowners, both individually and collectively. By the 1880s, a mass movement of Blacks and Whites had arisen under the populist banner. Populists identified northern industrial capitalists and southern plantation monopolists as “enemies of cooperatively based
