organizations, including the Knights of Labor, continued their work (Reynolds 2002; Ali 2003).
Shift in Focus to Politics
The White and Black populist movements had similar purposes but often used different strategies. African American populists supported White programs when it served their interest, such as patronizing Southern Alliance cooperative stores and lobbying for the same legislation (Ali 2003, 120; Holmes 1973), but they pursued their own policies and actions when it did not. White alliance members tolerated Black support but were intolerant of the organization when it diverged from White aims and control. As Holmes puts it, “As long as the Colored Alliance supported the programs of the Southern Alliance, many whites tolerated its existence. But when it tried to solve problems that contributed directly to the plight of Southern blacks [bettering their economic conditions and lessening their dependence on whites], it conflicted with the economic and racial policies of the white South” (1973, 274).
Many of the CFNACU’s economic efforts were failures, and so members turned to politics. Increasing debt, lack of capital, declining crop prices, and poor wages hurt their members in particular. Also, as with earlier co-op efforts, members of these organizations usually engaged in economic activities, particularly the cooperatives, while on strike, unemployed, or experiencing economic difficulties. Resources were therefore scarce. Running businesses of any kind under these conditions was difficult. In addition, Ali notes that tactical failures, the inability to sustain cooperative stores, and limits to lobbying for agrarian reforms “convinced increasing numbers of black Populist leaders of the need to enter the political arena directly” (2003, 117). While the CFNACU “began as a strictly ‘non-partisan’ mutual benefit association focused on economic cooperation, it developed into one of the most radical organizations of the era, carrying out boycotts and strikes and ultimately helping to create an independent political party, the People’s Party” (81). When efforts to make economic change were thwarted, the CFNACU changed strategies, applying pressure on political candidates. Between 1890 and 1892 there was talk of forming a third national political party. Black and White southerners affiliated with the alliances held a series of meetings with other activists from labor, agrarian, and reform organizations (“including the northern-established Knights of Labor, which de facto became a black organization as it spread into the South”) to discuss the issue (Ali 2005, 6). By 1892 they had formed the national People’s Party, with state-based independent parties in coalition with White independents.
Thwarted Dreams
Like the Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, and other farmers’ alliances, whose vision of establishing cooperatives and exchanges was not realized, the CFNACU and its cooperative ventures were short-lived.6 At its height, the CFNACU, learning in part from the mutual-aid movement as well as the various Black populist and organized labor movements, used collective action, cooperative economics, economic solidarity, and political action to strengthen the position of Black farmers and farmworkers, form strategies for sustainable farming, and advocate for economic and political rights. All of the Black populist efforts (like the White ones) were targeted by White employers, banks, and railway owners, who sanctioned White vigilantes. Early Black cooperators suffered physical violence—even death—as well as economic sabotage. At the same time, even the unsuccessful campaigns provided invaluable lessons about economic and political organizing at the grassroots level. Both the frustrations and the small victories associated with these efforts would be remembered, and the vision of a cooperative society would continue to surround the Black civil rights and liberation movements.
Early African American–Owned “Cooperative” Businesses
Even rural communities that lacked the almost total isolation of the Sea Islands possessed a strong commitment to corporatism and a concomitant scorn for the hoarding of private possessions. . . . It is clear that these patterns of behavior were determined as much by economic necessity as by cultural “choice.” If black household members pooled their energies to make a good crop, and if communities collectively provided for their own welfare, then poverty and oppression ruled out most of the alternative strategies. Individualism was a luxury that sharecroppers simply could not afford.
—JONES (1985, 101–2)
More importantly, the Commission [the 1961 Civil Rights Commission] failed to recognize the degree to which community cooperation during the early years of the twentieth century helped move local farmers away from economic dependence on whites. Actuated by a strong sense of community, residents of Charles City County developed a diverse agricultural economy that included very few tenant farmers. With little need or desire to depend on white factory and landowners, between 1900 and 1930 black farmers achieved a level of economic independence that later aided in the struggle for political rights and racial justice.
—CRAIG (1987, 133–34)
Cooperative businesses among African Americans developed slowly—often evolving from mutual-aid societies to mutual insurance companies and from joint-stock companies to Rochdale cooperatives—as African Americans be-came more sophisticated and experienced in cooperative ownership. W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 study in some ways lumps all efforts at economic cooperation together. In this chapter, I examine these businesses from the 1880s to the early 1900s for elements of cooperative economic principles and practices and as examples of the evolution into formal cooperative businesses. During this era, most of these businesses were urban enterprises engaged more in offering services and retail sales than in the production of goods. In addition, in the nineteenth century, the concept of Black capitalism was a strategy of racial economic solidarity and cooperation, as was Negro joint-stock ownership (for example, the Chesapeake Marine Railway shipyard in Baltimore, the Coleman Manufacturing Company in Concord, North Carolina, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s Black Star Line and Negro Factories Corporation). Mutual insurance companies were the earliest formal cooperative businesses among Blacks and Whites in the United States. As noted earlier, starting in the late nineteenth century, African Americans also organized official cooperative businesses that followed the European “Rochdale Principles of Cooperation.”1 Other early official cooperatives were farm cooperatives and cooperative marketing boards, consumer cooperative grocery stores, cooperative schools, and credit unions.
Mutual Insurance Companies
Some of the successful mutual-aid societies developed into insurance companies when they formalized as businesses. As some societies became more sophisticated and substituted a board of directors for general member control, they became insurance companies (Du Bois 1898, 18). In the 1880s, many Blacks had joined White insurance companies but discovered that they received fewer monetary benefits for the same service, even though they paid the same premium (or higher). This inspired Blacks to establish their own insurance companies that would not defraud or discriminate against African American clients (Du Bois 1907, 98). Many southern states then passed laws protecting White insurance companies.
One of the largest Black mutual insurance companies was the Grand United Order of the True Reformers, which grew to have branches throughout the South and East. It owned “considerable real estate and conduct[ed] a banking and annual premium insurance business at Richmond,” according to Du Bois (1898, 20). Organized in Richmond, Virginia, in 1881, it began with one hundred members and capital of $150. By 1901, with more than fifty thousand members, the society paid out $606,000 in death claims and $1,500,000 in sick claims. The True Reformers held more than $223,500 in assets. In addition, the organization boasted of having 2,678 lodges (totaling a hundred thousand members) and had paid out $979,440.55 in claims; and
