I made connections with Canadian scholars who study cooperatives as part of community economic development and as part of social and solidarity economies. I began to focus on worker-owned cooperatives and engaged in participatory action research in the U.S. worker co-op and larger cooperative movements. As a specialist in racial wealth inequality, I also began exploring ways in which cooperative ownership, particularly in worker cooperatives, is a strategy for community-based asset building, and I began to develop a concept of community wealth based on cooperative ownership and community assets.
The result is a book that focuses less on situating Black cooperative economics within one theory of Black political economy (as Haynes and I first attempted to do in our 1999 paper) and more on analyzing it as a theory and practice of economic development within a broad tradition of populism and economic justice.
Collective Courage is a historical study based largely on primary sources (newspaper, magazine, and journal articles; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, annual meeting minutes, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and cooperators’ letters and papers, memoirs, and biographies). This study is also informed by scholarly secondary sources and relies on economic analysis of quantitative and qualitative data, theoretical analysis, and applied theory using historical and present-day case studies and applying modern theories to understand the effectiveness of particular practices and strategies. In addition, I provide some analysis of balance sheets, budgets, and stock values.
While my archival research proved it impossible to uncover full case-study narratives of most of the African American cooperative enterprises and organizations from the past, I was able to collect many case-study “snapshots” of cooperative activity among African Americans to illustrate the successes and challenges of Black cooperative enterprises. Much of this information comes from newspaper and journal articles about specific cooperatives, memoirs of cooperative developers, and archives of cooperative organizations and their directors.
In addition, I engaged in applied participatory community-based research. As a part of the U.S. cooperative movement and the African American cooperative movement, I have studied cooperative enterprises and economics in the United States and Canada, and have participated in developing cooperative organizations and conferences to promote cooperative education and development. These organizations bring co-op members and supporters together to exchange best practices, provide education and training, organize and participate in co-op study tours, promote cooperative development, and network. This has allowed me to meet with many people (practitioners and scholars) in the cooperative movements in the United States and Canada, to learn from their presentations, talk with their members, and visit some of their cooperatives. I am particularly involved in the growing U.S. worker cooperative movement, and I now specialize in worker cooperatives. My participatory community-based research involves co-op members, co-op leaders, and co-op developers who articulate social, cultural, and political as well as economic impacts, and identifies relevant indicators to measure traditional and nontraditional outcomes of cooperative ownership. In addition to gathering information from workshops, presentations, and conferences, I used existing case studies and annual reports to assess the impact and benefits of co-ops and to understand their mission and history. I also conducted informal interviews and conversations, particularly during my own workshops. I am a member of several cooperative research organizations and research efforts in the United States and internationally. All of these contacts and the access to this information have helped to inform this study.
This story of African American cooperative economic activity is told partly in chronological order and partly thematically. Themes such as economic independence, economic protection and stabilization in the face of discrimination and violence, women’s roles, education and training, youth involvement, and community economic development are interwoven into a linear treatment of the development of African American cooperatives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is the first book-length work to connect the dots of African American cooperative endeavors.
A note on terminology. I use the terms African American and Black interchangeably, although I understand that there are nuanced differences between the two terms and how they are used. I also capitalize the word Black when I use it as a racial category. I use the word cooperative, no hyphen (as opposed to the short form, co-op, always hyphenated), except when quoting or referring to organizations that use the hyphen, as some of the cooperatives discussed in this book do, especially until the 1940s.
Organization of the Book
This book is divided into three parts. Part I, “Early African American Cooperative Roots,” covers collective benevolence, grassroots economic organizing, cooperative agriculture, and union cooperative ownership through the early twentieth century. The specific, deliberate development (or attempts at development) of Rochdale cooperatives among African Americans is the subject of part II, “Deliberative Cooperative Economic Development,” which covers Black co-op federations and agency-driven co-op development from about 1917 to 1975. Part III, “Twentieth-Century Practices, Twenty-First-Century Solutions,” consists of two chapters that pull this history together and attempt to provide a guide for pursuing cooperative development in the twenty-first century.
Chapter 1, “Early Black Economic Cooperation: Intentional Communities, Communes, and Mutual Aid,” analyzes the mutual-aid movement among African Americans and the development of communal societies. The mutual-aid movement involved a large proportion of the Black community and continued for centuries. I chronicle the myriad Black mutual-aid societies that sprang up during and after enslavement and examine their accomplishments, effectiveness, and the special role of African American women in founding and running them. Examples include the Independent Order of Saint Luke (Maryland and Virginia), the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association (Tennessee), founded by African American women, and the Free African Society (Pennsylvania). These early forms of collective ownership, buying in bulk, and charitable service were the precursors of mutual insurance companies, social service agencies, and joint-stock companies. They were also often the basis of early Black intentional communities. DeFilippis (2004) credits the Black “organized communities” of the nineteenth century as one of the most significant roots of the modern community-control movement. Chapter 1 thus highlights important elements of the early Black self-help communal settlements and intentional communities, both before and after the Civil War, that were often inspired by or part of the European and U.S. utopian commune movement. The contributions to this movement of African American abolitionists such as Sojourner Truth, David Ruggles, and Frederick Douglass are also noted.
Chapter 2, “From Economic Independence to Political Advocacy: Cooperation and the Nineteenth-Century Black Populist Movement,” focuses on African American involvement in early populist movements for grassroots empowerment, particularly in rural areas of the United States after the Civil War. This chapter discusses the struggle for agricultural independence from sharecropping through cooperative ownership and African American economic solidarity, for example, in the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-operative Union. The American populist movement was highly segregated. This chapter looks at African Americans’ struggle to have a voice in that movement, to have their issues addressed, and to create agricultural, marketing, and industrial cooperatives through populist organizations and unions (such as the Knights of Labor and the Cooperative Workers of America) during the late nineteenth century.
Mutual insurance companies were the earliest cooperative-like incorporated businesses in the United States for both Blacks and Whites.9 The Grand United Order of the True Reformers (Richmond, Virginia) and the Independent Order of Saint Luke (Richmond, Virginia) are examples of African American fraternal and mutual-aid societies that created mutual insurance companies. Their mutual insurance companies, such as North Carolina Mutual (Raleigh), stores, and banks are discussed in chapter
