agenda by building schools, establishing new towns, buying land, and protesting the denial of civil and human rights, even though they were essentially voteless and increasingly segregated. “Out of necessity,” Woods observes, “many of those who remained in the South focused again on the land and labor reform agenda by organizing rural unions to end peonage, to improve wages, and to end the thievery associated with year-end settlements” (9).
This is the context in which the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-operative Union matured and operated. It tried to promote political action among African Americans to ensure economic opportunity and stability (Ali 2003). “Dominated by small land-owners, this movement engaged in independent party politics while simultaneously building an economic infrastructure for a new society” (Woods 1998, 8).
The Black populist movement was heavily influenced by the attempts of racially integrated unions to develop a cooperative commonwealth in the late nineteenth century. The CFNACU pulled together elements of the Black populist movement in the 1880s and ’90s. The colored alliances also continued the cooperative development that the Knights of Labor began. From the beginning, the CFNACU presented itself as a mutual-benefit organization devoted to improving the lives of Black farmers and agrarian laborers through education and economic cooperation. Its members became as militant as the Knights of Labor and led “some of the most ambitious strikes and boycotts,” which made Black populism “even more of a threat to the establishment” (Ali 2003, 61n107).
The Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-operative Union
As the earlier populist organizations disbanded and went underground, the CFNACU began to pull together grassroots efforts and form a network of regional and national organizations. Like the mutual-aid societies, many were connected with and relied on churches (Ali 2003, 70). The first Negro alliance was organized in Arkansas in 1882 (76n3). Members of local chapters shared agricultural techniques and innovations and coordinated cooperative efforts for planting and harvesting (77). Similarly, in Macon, Georgia, at a meeting of 350 African Americans, a Reverend Love offered a resolution to form “cooperative associations, cooperative farms, and storehouses.”4
Officially founded by J. J. Shuffer, H. L. Spencer, and R. M. Humphrey in 1886 in Houston County, Texas, the CFNACU spread to establish chapters in every state in the South (Curl 2009, 111; Holmes n.d.). In March 1888, the alliance held its first national meeting in Lovelady, Texas (Humphrey 1891; Miller 1972; Spriggs 1979; Ali 2003). The CFNACU consolidated several Black-focused agrarian organizations in the South—the Colored Agricultural Wheels, the Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, and the Florida Farmers Union5—into a regional coalition. “The focus of these early groups was on relief through collectivizing resources, and collective bargaining through boycotts and strikes” (Ali 2005, 5). By 1891 the CFNACU boasted a membership of more than one million (Ali 2003), though, according to Curl, the alliance “had one and a quarter million members, making it the largest-ever organization of black Americans, most of them sharecroppers and tenant farmers” (2009, 111). Most accounts, however, suggest that the total was closer to four or five hundred thousand members (Holmes 1973). In any case, the CFNACU was indisputably the largest African American organization of its time. While its local leaders were Black, the state and regional organizers were largely White, headed by the White founder Reverend Humphrey, who was general superintendent. Whites were able to organize openly in places where Blacks would be physically attacked (Curl 2009, 112).
The CFNACU was a self-help organization that encouraged members to work hard and sacrifice to uplift themselves. Some state chapters raised money to keep Black public schools open for longer terms, founded academies, and solicited funds to help the sick and disabled. In many ways, the CFNACU was another mutual-aid society. But it was also formed to increase Black political participation, and it advocated a political agenda. It often mirrored its White counterpart, the Southern Farmers’ Alliance (a branch of the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union, referred to as the Southern Alliance), in terms of philosophy and program, supporting most of the same policies (Holmes 1973). For example, in 1890 the CFNACU supported the Southern Alliance’s subtreasury plan, hoping that it would provide low-interest loans for farmers and high prices for agricultural produce (Holmes 1973, 269; Reynolds 2002; Ali 2003). The CFNACU also supported policies that the Southern Alliance did not, such as the Lodge election bill to provide federal protection to safeguard voting rights in the South, and the 1891 cotton pickers’ strike.
While some Black members owned small farms, many were sharecroppers and field hands on White plantations. The CFNACU urged members to improve their farming methods and learn new techniques, purchase their own land and homes, and improve their education (Holmes 1973, 268). It promoted collectivizing resources (Ali 2005). “Before being violently suppressed, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance advocated the expansion of land ownership and the creation of cooperative stores designed to pool African American resources while boycotting stores owned by planters or allied merchants and commissaries” (Woods 1998, 8). Branches established exchanges (cooperative stores/warehouses and credit outlets) in the ports of Norfolk, Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans, and Houston where members could buy goods at reduced prices and borrow money from the organization to buy land and equipment or pay off a loan (Ali 2003, 89; Holmes 1973 and n.d.). In some areas, the CFNACU shared an exchange with the Southern Alliance, although these were tenuous collaborations and often short-lived. The CFNACU communicated through branch newspapers to provide information about discriminatory legislation, monopolies and their effects on African Americans, and the latest initiatives of the organization, such as cooperative exchange projects, lobbying efforts, credit programs, and cost-saving measures (Ali 2003, 80–81). The organization sustained almost continuous opposition to its very existence from the White plantation bloc and even from Southern Alliance members.
The Leflore Massacre
“The troubles in Leflore County sprang largely from the attempts by blacks to improve themselves financially” (Holmes 1973, 268). In Leflore County, Mississippi, the CFNACU shared an exchange with the White Southern Alliance. One Oliver Cromwell began organizing chapters of the CFNACU in Leflore County in 1889. Holmes credits Cromwell with persuading Blacks to stop trading with local merchants and use the Farmers’ Alliance cooperative store in the nearby town of Durant. White Leflore County merchants were losing Black business (and debt) and began to try to undermine Cromwell and the CFNACU. They defamed Cromwell, threatened him, and started rumors that he had embezzled CFNACU funds. The CFNACU men rallied to defend him. The White citizens were fearful of a rebellion and requested that the governor send troops to protect them. While the rest of the account is confused and contradictory, the governor did send three companies of troops, and local armed Whites patrolled the county. It appears that local militias or posses massacred at least twenty-five Blacks. Accounts, including Black newspaper accounts, reported as many as a hundred African Americans murdered. While CFNACU men rallied, most accounts agree that they had little ammunition; no Whites were killed. The incident was not actually well publicized at the time. Neither state nor county officials took any action in response to the mass killings. “The killings in Laflore County illustrate a condition then widespread in the South” (Holmes 1973, 274).
The episode helps to explain “why the Colored Alliance was such a short-lived movement” (Holmes 1973; see also Holmes 1975 and n.d.). After the massacre, White planters held a meeting declaring that the CFNACU had overstepped its bounds. They notified the editor of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance Advocate that distribution of the newspaper to its subscribers in the county would be halted and that and any attempt to distribute the newspaper in Leflore County would be dealt with harshly. The plantation bloc leaders also ordered the cooperative store, the Durant Commercial Company, to “desist from selling goods or loaning money to the Colored Alliance or to any of its members” (Holmes 1973, 274), although it was still allowed to serve the White members of the Southern Alliance. Many of the CFNACU leaders had fled by this time if they hadn’t been killed, and the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-operative Union in Leflore County collapsed.
By 1896,
