audience, Warbasse observed, “The fact that he [the Negro] is the most exploited of all people, that the government discriminates against him, and that he pays more for what he buys than does the white citizen should open his eyes to the possibility of co-operation” (1918, 224). Du Bois argued that cooperatives would provide the economic opportunities denied to African Americans, and would allow Blacks to serve the common good rather than be slaves to market forces (Du Bois 1933b).6 Similarly, George S. Schuyler contended early in his career that cooperative economics would “save the race” (Schuyler 1930b, n.d.). A. Philip Randolph connected the consumers’ cooperative movement to the labor movement (Randolph 1918; Wilson and Randolph 1938). Halena Wilson (1952) urged her fellow members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to seriously consider the “mutual profit and common benefit” of cooperative ownership. By 1992 Jeremiah Cotton was rationalizing that since Blacks suffer common material conditions (“if each black person’s material well-being is dependent on that of all other blacks”), they should exercise “community cooperation” (1992, 24). This book explores the cooperative thought of these and other Black leaders, chronicles their cooperative practices, and provides context for their cooperative economic ideas and strategies.
Is There an African American Cooperative Tradition?
When I began this project fifteen years ago, my colleague Curtis Haynes Jr. and I had been exploring how theories of cooperative economic development and Black self-help could address late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century urban redevelopment or revitalization. We made the case that what we called Du Bois’s theory of racial cooperative economic development,7 combined with Hogan’s theory of Black self-help and the model of Mondragon Cooperative Corporation among the Basque people in northern Spain,8 made a compelling case for public policy that fostered and supported cooperative economic development in Black urban communities (Haynes and Gordon Nembhard 1999; Gordon Nembhard and Haynes, 2002, 2003). It seemed reasonable to us that combining the thought of two important African American activist scholars with successful practice among another subaltern group would provide a straightforward prescription for economic revival in U.S. inner cities. Before the Haynes and Gordon Nembhard article in 1999, contemporary Black political economy rarely included an analysis of cooperative economics; and, to date, neither the delineation of a theory of Black cooperative economic development nor an in-depth analysis of the strategy and its accomplishments and benefits has been accomplished.
Haynes and I have also identified the elements of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in northern Spain that are replicable and illustrate networked cooperative economic development (Gordon Nembhard and Haynes 2002, 2003). We identified elements such as solidarity, worker sovereignty, clustering, leadership development, and education as essential to understanding cooperatives as a group economy strategy. I examine these concepts more fully in part III of this volume.
While presenting the general theory that cooperatives are an important strategy for economic development for African Americans and discussing our analysis with others, two major questions arose: have Black folk ever practiced cooperative economics? And why would resources be allocated for this? I became very curious about the first question, and as I began to talk more about cooperatives as a strategy for Black community economic development, more and more people told me that Black people do not participate in co-ops. So I set out to determine whether, and how much, African Americans have been involved in cooperative economics, and why African American memories and histories do not include cooperative practices or address cooperative strategy. In the wake of the UN celebration of cooperatives in 2012, this book offers a history of African American cooperative economic development that documents significant Black involvement in the cooperative movement. It is my hope that it will help us to understand the challenges and celebrate the successes of African American cooperative activity.
Methodology
Seeking to understand African Americans’ connection to cooperatives, I began by rereading Haynes’s theoretical analysis of Du Bois’s cooperative economic thought (Haynes 1993, 1994, 1999) and then reread Du Bois himself on the subject (Du Bois 1907, 1933b, 1933c, 1935b, 1940). After 1907, Du Bois rarely wrote about specific Black co-op practices, but his 1907 study, Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans, provided a brief outline of a history of cooperative activity among Blacks and was full of examples. His 1940 autobiography and his speeches of the 1930s discussed the promise of cooperative economic practice and why it was important. Since Du Bois was also a founding editor of the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis, I thought that that would be a good place to look for references to twentieth-century African American cooperatives. Indeed, the Crisis published twelve articles between 1914 and 1944 about African American–owned cooperatives. Other Black publications—the Black World, the Messenger, and Phylon—contained several more. The stories in the Crisis and these other periodicals led me to archives of Ella Jo Baker, executive director of the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League in the early 1930s, where I found more information about African American–owned cooperatives. I also looked at the papers of Nannie Helen Burroughs and Fannie Lou Hamer, and the several archives housing the papers of A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and its Ladies’ Auxiliary. I discovered the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund and started attending its meetings and conferences, exploring its archives, and learning more about the Black rural cooperative economic movement. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives is the only existing organization of African American cooperatives (see chapter 9).
As my research progressed and I began to cast a wider net, discussing my findings with colleagues and seeking new leads, more and more people approached me with information about cooperatives they had heard of or that their families had been involved in. In what I can only describe as a snowball effect, friends, acquaintances, and other scholars referred me to others who knew about the Black co-op movement, offered to share material, or even wanted to help with my research. I also began reading the memoirs of Black activists for references to co-ops or cooperative economic strategies, which also proved to be quite fruitful. While I rarely found enough information to re-create the complete history of any one cooperative business, I found references and information about many African American–owned cooperatives—more than I had expected to find—that revealed a picture of cooperative ownership as an important economic strategy for African Americans. Once I started, it was impossible to stop. Each new discovery led to two or three more.
In addition, whenever I talked about my research, I met African Americans who suddenly recovered a memory or made a family connection to a cooperative, or discovered a connection with something they were trying to accomplish. During presentations and workshops on my research, faces would light up and memories of cooperative efforts would surface. More and more people approached me to say that they had suddenly realized that their parents, aunts, uncles, or grandparents had been involved in a cooperative venture, and that they now saw its significance in a new light. People from all over the country have sent me information and offers to help; even more people have asked me for information. This is a subject that not only resonates with people but never stops expanding. I finally had to establish some firm parameters for this volume, because otherwise I would never have finished it!
I connected the rich archival research I was undertaking with the economic analyses I was conducting about cooperative ownership and economic development. I read DeMarco 1974 and 1983, Stewart 1984, Shipp 1996 and 2000, Cotton 1992, Tabb 1970, Handy 1993, and Woods 1998 and 2007. Some of these works gave me ideas about alternative economic development theories and strategies; others provided more specific information about Black cooperative economic development. I was interested in cooperative economic development as a community economic development strategy, and my focus was on how cooperatives help subaltern populations gain economic independence, especially in the face of racial segregation, racial discrimination, and market failure. My colleague Melbah Smith told me early on that many of the urban challenges that could be solved by cooperatives were similar to the rural challenges, and so I broadened my focus to include community economic development
