this book, I learned that almost all African American leaders were involved in Black co-ops in some manner: they either promoted or engaged in the practice of cooperative ownership, particularly in their early careers or as part of their vision for a prosperous future without discrimination. In many ways, this cooperative history is also a retelling of African American history in general—a reconstructing of African American history through the lens of the Black cooperative movement. Many of the players are the same. Many of the great African American thinkers, movers, and shakers were also leaders in the Black cooperative movement. That part of their history and thought, however, has been mostly left out, ignored until now. Adding the cooperative movement revitalizes the telling of the African American experience and increases our understanding of African American agency and political economic organizing. This study answers the question of whether African Americans have a cooperative tradition with a resounding yes.
Economic participation in cooperatives increases the capacity to engage in civic and political participation and leadership development. Cooperatives also increase women’s economic participation, control over resources, and economic stability, with important implications. Cooperatives were used heavily during the Great Depression, contributing to community revitalization and saving struggling communities. In fact, the 1930s appear to mark the height of African American cooperative economic activity in the United States. With unemployment and poverty high, and services curtailed or unavailable, African Americans struggled to feed their families. They chose cooperative economics as a solution. Throughout history, especially in trying times, African Americans chose cooperation and often had good results. The current Great Recession has been the second-worst economic crisis in U.S. history. These are times in which many Black communities exist under conditions of high unemployment, deep poverty, and homelessness. Many who had assets were stripped of them. The cooperative solution is one that has addressed these same conditions throughout history. Cooperative ownership helps address the challenges of capitalism, marginalization in labor, capital, and product markets, and the lack of adequate, affordable, quality services. Current conditions require alternative strategies. Cooperatives are again a solution.
EARLY AFRICAN AMERICAN COOPERATIVE ROOTS
Consequently we find that the spirit of revolt which tried to co-operate by means of insurrection led to widespread organization for the rescue of fugitive slaves among Negroes themselves, and developed before the war in the North and during and after the war in the South, into various co-operative efforts toward economic emancipation and land buying. Gradually these efforts led to co-operative business, building and loan associations and trade unions.
—DU BOIS (1907, 26)
Early African American cooperative roots include collective benevolence, grassroots economic organizing, and cooperative agriculture. Part I of this book provides examples of many of the efforts at grassroots economic organizing and collective ownership among African Americans, starting from enslavement and focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Included in part I are efforts of African Americans to buy their own freedom collectively or escape enslavement collectively, as well as highlights of the Black mutual-aid movement, the Black utopian communities movement, early activities of Black trade unionists (particularly in the South), and early Black-owned businesses (particularly mutual insurance companies and joint-stock companies). These efforts illuminate the perseverance of African Americans in finding alternative economic strategies to promote economic stability and economic independence in the face of fierce competition, racial discrimination, and White supremacist violence and sabotage.
The first chapter reviews the history of Black cooperative communities and communes, and focuses on the history of African American mutual-aid and beneficial societies. Black cooperative agriculture and the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-operative Union form the basis of chapter 2, about cooperatives and the African American populist movement. Much of this history is fraught with examples of efforts at collective economic action that were thwarted by racial discrimination, White supremacist sabotage, and violence. Such efforts to undermine African American cooperative development persisted throughout the centuries (Du Bois 1907; Woods 1998).
Part I ends with a discussion of early African American–owned businesses that were at least jointly owned and often collectively or democratically governed, some according to the Rochdale principles, codified in Europe in 1895. Chapter 3 also includes a discussion of the economic ventures of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the United States and Marcus Garvey’s interest in economic democracy. It remains difficult to distinguish formal cooperative businesses from Du Bois’s descriptions of joint economic ownership in his two early books, as well as in the discussion of the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s joint-stock businesses. I discuss both cases as examples of economic cooperation and solidarity. Where possible, I mention specifically which examples in this chapter intentionally follow Rochdale principles of cooperative business ownership.
What we learn from this history is that economic cooperation was natural and continuous in the Black community of the United States. There were periods of rapid and successful cooperative effort and periods of relative dormancy, though there seems to be no period in U.S. history where African Americans were not involved in economic cooperation of some type.
Lessons Learned from Early Cooperative Efforts
Many different kinds of cooperative ventures have been tried in the Black community. A few of them are featured in part I. What do we learn from these early collective economic efforts, which led to the development and ownership of cooperative businesses, often based on the Rochdale principles, among African Americans? The lessons can be summarized as follows:
• In every period of American history, African Americans pooled resources to solve personal, family, social, political, and economic challenges. They often addressed freedom, health, child development, education, burial, employment, and investment in cooperative ventures in ways that leveraged and maximized returns and reduced risks.
• African Americans formed distinct, purposive, and formal (as well as informal) organizations through which to coordinate and channel collective action and joint ownership. Many of these were stable collective organizations that lasted for decades.
• African Americans used existing connections and affiliations—religious, fraternal, geographical, and political—to develop new organizations or promote new missions. These existing networks provided the sense of trust and solidarity that often helped solidify the new effort. Racial solidarity, for example, became a major resource for these and future Black organizations and businesses.
• African American women played significant roles, held leadership positions, and often formed their own organizations throughout these periods and across almost every kind of organization. As founders and main participants in many mutual-aid societies, women were instrumental in organizational development, fund-raising, day-to-day coordination, and networking for cooperatives as well as other organizations.
• These activities developed among diverse groups and in diverse settings: in urban and rural areas among farmers, landholders, sharecroppers, day laborers, domestic workers, industrial workers, and the unemployed, as well as small business owners and professionals. Geography had little impact on depressing the cooperative spirit and seemed not to stand in the way of collective economic activity. Similarly, while some organizations were class based and exclusive, many more began as grassroots self-help movements, open to all—and were sometimes all the stronger because multiple classes were represented. In addition, these collective activities took place among ideologies of both racial separation and integration.
