The Northampton Association of Education and Industry
The Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI) was a utopian community and short-lived integrated commune in western Massachusetts. Among its inhabitants were Sojourner Truth, a washerwoman, formerly enslaved, who became an outspoken abolitionist and feminist, famous for her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, and David Ruggles, an African American printer and leader of the Underground Railroad, and an advocate of hydrotherapy (by 1845 he had established a water-cure hospital in the area, one of the first in the country). The NAEI was established in 1842 in the town of Florence (outside Northampton) as an intentional utopian community by abolitionists and social reformers (Historic Northampton n.d.). They established a community around a communally owned and operated silk mill. Milling of silk was chosen in part because the “equal and classless” silkworm is a symbol of democracy. The NAEI was a predominantly White organization that believed in the possibility of a socially, politically, and economically egalitarian society. It operated as an economic commune, and education was an integral component of the collective’s aim to create a democratic and socially responsible society. The founders felt that everyone could do any job and encouraged members to learn silk milling, housekeeping, and social justice work “by doing”—by engaging in the work together, fostering active participation by all, and creating an egalitarian work environment. Members worked and studied together six days a week. On Sunday morning they worshipped, and Sunday afternoons were set aside for free discussions and debates about world issues as well as commune policies (Collaborative for Educational Services 2009b).
Three or four African Americans were associated with the NAEI. The abolitionists Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and David Ruggles were active participants and the most famous of the NAEI’s Black members. The association accepted (harbored) fugitives from enslavement as part of its abolitionist and social justice mission (Collaborative for Educational Services 2009a).
Frederick Douglass was a fugitive from enslavement, an abolitionist, a newspaper editor, and a shipbuilder by trade who became an advisor to presidents and the first African American recorder of deeds in the District of Columbia after the Civil War. Although Douglass started his association with the NAEI at its beginnings in 1842, and would stop there on his way to giving abolitionist lectures in New England, he never lived there. Douglass visited several times, engaged in debates there, and gave speeches at the commune. He wrote about his experience with the NAEI in 1895, noting that its goals were to “change and improve conditions of human existence; to liberate mankind from the bondage of time-worn custom; to curb and fix limits to individual selfishness; to diffuse wealth among the lowly; to banish poverty; to harmonize conflicting interests, and to promote the happiness of mankind generally” (1895, 129). Douglass was struck by the sense of liberty and equality he felt among the group: “The place and the people struck me as the most democratic I had ever met. It was a place to extinguish all aristocratic pretensions. There was no high, no low, no masters, no servants, no white, and no black. I, however, felt myself in very high society” (130). The NAEI was the only place Douglass had ever been in the United States where he felt that his color was not used against him. “My impressions of the Community,” he wrote, “are not only the impressions of a stranger, but those of a fugitive slave to whom at that time even Massachusetts opposed a harsh and repellant side. The cordial reception I met with at Florence, was, therefore, much enhanced by its contrast with many other places in that commonwealth. Here, at least, neither my color nor my condition was counted against me” (130). Douglass also mentioned meeting David Ruggles and Sojourner Truth there, and noted how well the community treated and protected them.
Sojourner Truth joined the NAEI in 1843 and lived there for about two years. It was there that she met William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass, and Wendell Phillips, and afterward became an abolitionist and women’s rights activist and speaker. The commune elected Truth head of laundry, where she supervised White members of the collective, an unheard-of arrangement at the time (Collaborative for Educational Services 2009b). Truth recalled that the NAEI, more than anywhere else she had ever lived, provided “equality of feeling,” “liberty of thought and speech,” and “largeness of soul” (Historic Northampton n.d.), in spite of difficult living conditions. Truth described her first thoughts about the NAEI:
She did not fall in love at first sight with the Northampton Association, for she arrived there at a time when appearances did not correspond with the ideas of associationists, as they had been spread out in their writings; for their phalanx was a factory, and they were wanting in means to carry out their ideas of beauty and elegance, as they would have done in different circumstances. But she thought she would make an effort to tarry with them one night, though that seemed to her no desirable affair. But as soon as she saw that accomplished, literary and refined persons were living in that plain and simple manner, and submitting to the labors and privations incident to such an infant institution, she said, “Well, if these can live here, I can.” Afterwards, she gradually became pleased with, and attached to, the place and the people, as well she might; for it must have been no small thing to have found a home in a “Community composed of some of the choicest spirits of the age,” where all was characterised by an equality of feeling, a liberty of thought and speech, and a largeness of soul, she could not have before met with, to the same extent, in any of her wanderings. (Truth 1850, “Another Camp Meeting”)
The commune did not last, and Truth’s feelings of contentment and security there wore off as well.
When we first saw her, she was working with a hearty good will; saying she would not be induced to take regular wages, believing, as once before, that now Providence had provided her with a never-failing fount, from which her every want might be perpetually supplied through her mortal life. In this, she had calculated too fast. For the Associationists found, that, taking every thing into consideration, they would find it most expedient to act individually; and again, the subject of this sketch found her dreams unreal, and herself flung back upon her own resources for the supply of her needs. (Ibid.)
Over its four and a half years of existence, more than two hundred people joined the commune. Largely because they could not operate the silk mill at a profit, the community disbanded in 1846 (Collaborative for Educational Services 2009c). According to Truth and her biographer, however, the NAEI also failed because individualism corrupted the communal spirit. All members, including the African American members, moved on, but they recalled the experiment fondly, though also with disappointment.
Black communes or independent communities, such as Nashoba Commune in Tennessee and the Combahee River Colony of Black women in South Carolina, experienced both success and failure.
The Nashoba Commune
The Nashoba Commune was planned as an organized Negro community that practiced communitarianism in Tennessee in 1825. Founder Frances Wright, an early women’s suffragist and an admirer of New Harmony, the Owenite utopian community in Indiana, planned to buy fifty to a hundred enslaved African Americans, set them up in a community, divide their time between manual work and academic study, train them for freedom, and provide for their colonization outside the United States (Pease and Pease 1963; Curl 1980).2 All African American members were responsible for paying their own way, purchasing their own freedom, and paying the cost of eventual colonization. Slave owners were to be compensated, and the money invested in the community was to be paid back. According to Curl, “While Owen’s concept strove toward the liberation of all people from wage-slavery, Wright tried to apply the concept to chattel-slavery. She considered it one last hope for the liberation of black people short of violent insurrection” (1980, 11).
Wright bought three hundred acres near Memphis. Once established, the Nashoba Commune actually became an interracial community of free persons—enslaved people were no longer invited to join unless they were original inhabitants and their masters moved with them. Sometimes called a cooperative and sometimes a commune, the community struggled socially and politically for three years. African Americans were not allowed to hold leadership positions. Local racists also harassed the community