interesting historical note to Garvey’s failed economic attempts, particularly with the Black Star Line, and connections with other economic visions at the time, is Du Bois’s attempt to resurrect the idea of a U.S.-Africa commercial shipping line. Perhaps ironically, Du Bois, basically a critic of Garvey’s economic projects, had a plan to resurrect the Black Star Line in some fashion in 1923. He wrote to the secretary of state, Charles Hughes, about the failure of the U.S. Congress to confirm a Liberian loan in January 1923 (Du Bois 1923). By this time the Black Star Line was bankrupt, but according to Du Bois there was still interest in commerce between the United States and Liberia. He summarized the aftermath of the Black Star Line “fiasco”:
The difficulty with this [the bankruptcy of the Black Star Line] was that its leader, Marcus Garvey, was not a business man and turned out to be a thoroughly impractical visionary, if not a criminal, with grandiose schemes of conquest. The result was that he wasted some eight or nine hundred thousand dollars of the hard-earned pennies of Negro laborers. However, two things are clear; nearly a million dollars of Black Star Line stock of the Garvey movement is now distributed among colored people and is absolutely without value. On the other hand, the United States owns thousands of vessels, any one or two of which might be used to initiate the plan I have spoken of. (261)
Du Bois wanted the U.S. government to provide two ships to begin a commercial trade venture between Liberia and the United States. Moreover, he asked the secretary of state if such a venture could legally be connected to the worthless Black Star stock in “an attempt to restore the confidence of the mass of American Negroes in commercial enterprise with Africa, possibly by having a private company headed by men of highest integrity, both white and colored, to take up and hold in trust, the Black Star Line certificates” (261). There is no record of a reply to that letter. However, this is more evidence of Du Bois’s interest not just in Pan-African commerce but also in redeeming the concept of joint ownership.
Marcus Garvey, much like Booker T. Washington (and like Du Bois, though most of the time they thought they had very different ideas from each other), urged African Americans to find separate economic solutions to their plight and to control their own economic enterprises. Shipp contends that Garvey wanted these businesses to be managed by their members—the stockholders—and operate democratically. Advertisements in Black newspapers connected participation and investment in these enterprises with the uplift of the race, a strategy for Black liberation, and a way to make a profit by supporting Black endeavors (Briggs 2003 provides copies of some of these ads). Shipp maintains that “the cooperative or collective, as implemented by Garvey, would be a part of an expansive market area, beginning with each UNIA chapter and spreading outward to create a Pan-African trading network based on economic cooperation” (1996, 88).
The Negro World did cover cooperative activity in the African American community, reporting on co-op housing, buying clubs, credit unions, and the Colored Merchants Association (see chapter 6). In addition, the December 27, 1924, edition of the Negro World provides in-depth coverage of a new report from the Russell Sage Foundation called “Sharing Management with the Workers” (Negro World 1924). The subhead includes the phrase “Negroes also benefit,” though it is not obvious from reading the article that any of the employees of the Dutchess Bleachery in Wappingers Falls, New York, who benefitted from the partnership plan were Black. The article does suggest that the UNIA considered this kind of information about workplace democracy important to its readers and members.
Shipp contends that Du Bois based his promotion of cooperative economic development for African Americans on Garvey’s philosophy in the 1930s. However, my research and analysis of Du Bois’s theory of economic cooperation (supported by Haynes 1993 and 1999; DeMarco 1974; and Rudwick 1968) find that Du Bois was already discussing economic cooperation and cooperative businesses in 1898. He wrote a book and called a conference on the subject in 1907, and read and was in contact with the major cooperative thinkers in the United States and United Kingdom by the early 1900s. He established the Negro Cooperative Guild in 1918. Du Bois, therefore, developed his cooperative economics philosophy separately from Garvey, and probably before Garvey, although it is not surprising that great minds would light on similar strategies. Indeed, one of the findings of this study is that many African American leaders and scholars supported the concept of cooperative economic development at some point (often early on) in their careers, if not throughout.
Du Bois did recognize the potential that Garvey and the UNIA had amassed. He wrote that Garvey had proved that “American Negroes can, by accumulating and ministering their own capital, organize industry, join the black centers of the south Atlantic by commercial enterprise and in this way ultimately redeem Africa as a fit and free home for black men” (1921, 977; see also Taylor 2002, 47). Also, Du Bois’s letter to the secretary of state in 1923 suggests that he did not consider a venture like the Black Star Line a bad idea, just poorly executed (see also Du Bois 1921). It is also clear that he was very interested in restoring Black people’s faith in joint ownership.
Marcus Garvey may have written and spoken about pooling resources, been philosophically in favor of cooperative economics, and been interested in promoting cooperative ownership in some of his projects, but the economic organizations started by the UNIA were joint-stock companies rather than cooperative businesses as defined by the Rochdale principles, and the majority of stock was owned by the UNIA. Moreover, Garvey rarely practiced financial transparency, a cooperative principle (Du Bois complained of this; see Du Bois 1921), and was known to be authoritative. Like many of the examples from Du Bois’s 1898 and 1907 studies, the UNIA businesses are examples of economic cooperation among Negroes, but they were not cooperative business enterprises. The UNIA businesses had serious management problems, and none of them operated very successfully, even though they may have solved the capitalization problem by amassing so many small contributions from UNIA members. They also were sabotaged by the U.S. government and others who did not want such grand efforts to succeed. This was another example of serious physical, financial, and political challenges to collective African American economic action. Nonetheless, we see here deliberate actions by African Americans to work with others, to pool resources, to own their own businesses, to provide services to their community, and to earn a decent living—even in the face of both poverty and outside threats.
These efforts were short-lived, but they were gestures grand enough to remain in the African American collective memory—whether as an example of how the U.S. government will retaliate if you try to do too much economically for Black people, or as a lesson that collective projects end in embezzlement and financial mismanagement. While the first has much basis in fact—the Ex-Slave Pension Association was hounded by the federal government, as was the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in the 1970s—the second is a misconception that has hindered some in the Black community from becoming more involved in joint ownership and cooperative economics. For some reason, there is not as strong a collective memory about the cooperative efforts that succeeded.
It is worth noting that in addition to economic advancement—or attempts at economic advancement—Garvey’s UNIA supported women’s leadership. Taylor (2002, 45, 87) and others point out the ways in which women, particularly Garvey’s wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, found their place in the organization and practiced “community feminism,” a term that describes the Combahee River Colony and some of the other mutual-benefit societies run by women, which were successful efforts at collective economics.
Early African American Rochdale Cooperatives
In 1898, Du Bois’s assessment of Black business development and cooperative businesses in general was not optimistic: “From such enterprises sprang the beneficial societies, and to-day slowly and with difficulty is arising real co-operative business enterprise detached from religious activity or insurance. On the other hand, private business enterprise has made some beginning, and in a few cases united into joint stock enterprises. It will be years, however, before this kind of business is very successful” (1898, 21–22). Du Bois counted about fifteen emerging cooperative businesses in 1898,
