The Combahee River Colony
The Combahee River Colony had a much different beginning and purpose. The colony was located in a remote area where African Americans established their own settlements and remained relatively self-sufficient and semiautonomous: the Gullah/Geechee communities in the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands. The Combahee River Colony in South Carolina consisted of several hundred African American women during the Civil War whose men had gone to join the Union Army. They occupied abandoned farmland where they “grew crops and cared for one another” (Jones 1985, 52). They refused to work for Whites and were proud of their handicrafts and cotton crop, as well as their independence. The community became relatively well known as an example of Black women’s independence, perseverance, and collective spirit.
Fit to Be Free
Pease and Pease describe these “organized Negro communities”—“designed to prove that the Negro was fit to be a free man”—as “impressive undertakings,” both in the goals set and “in the dedication, zeal, and vision of those who devoted themselves to” them (1963, 160). They were political and economic havens for escaped enslaved people and impoverished freedmen, operating under ideals of Jeffersonian agrarianism and, later, urban-industrial entrepreneurship. These communities provided academic and vocational education, as well as citizenship and political training for moral and spiritual improvement and leadership development. Although collective in practice, the ideals promoted most by the White organizers (and many of the Black leaders) were the ultimate achievement of middle-class culture, individualism, and capitalist development. Individuals and their families did benefit. During the time they lived there, and while the communities were successful, members were able to make a living collectively, to provide themselves and their children with a good education and other training, and often to own their own land. While the examples show that there were benefits from and positive aspects of these communities, they were also based largely on paternalistic relationships between White benefactor-managers and Black residents. These communities suffered many hardships, missteps, frauds, and failures. Pease and Pease observe that “often settlements looked less like co-operative community enterprises than like isolated reservations” (1963, 162). The goal was to create gentleman farmers out of ex-enslaved people, to have them work the soil to improve their character. Most of these communities succeeded in training Blacks to adjust to and integrate into White society, but not in changing White attitudes, making systemic changes, or even operating in separate utopian societies. The Combahee River Colony stands out as one of the few that had genuine strong African American leadership and were largely autonomous of White oversight. Pease and Pease conclude pessimistically that “the results were, on the whole, . . . tragically inconsequential” (160).
Nevertheless, these experiments in communal living provided training in and collective memory of democratic communities and attempts at cooperative economics among African Americans. Some of the communities, especially those organized by African Americans for their own independence, such as the Combahee River Colony, were much more separatist in desire and collective in practice. DeFilippis notes that some socialist communes were radical:
While the black communes emerged in the 1830s and were explicitly geared toward reproducing agrarian and mercantile capitalism in black communities, there was a parallel and yet completely different history of nineteenth-century communes and collectives that were oriented toward exactly the opposite goal—creating places outside the constraints and structures of the emergent industrial capitalist world of wage slavery and employment-based production. These “utopian” communities were attempts at local-scale communism, and they were largely divided between secular and religious communes, although there was a good deal of overlap. (2004, 39)3
Although none of the Owenite communes were predominantly African American—most had no Black members at all (because Blacks and Whites were not supposed to live together)—an exception was the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. As noted above, the NAEI invited interracial membership and allowed Black leadership. The Nashoba Commune was supposed to be, first, a predominantly Black utopian society (or at least training ground), and, second, an integrated utopian society whose purpose was to provide opportunities for African Americans to learn communal living while earning enough to buy their freedom and passage to Haiti or Liberia. Unlike the NAEI, Nashoba was not particularly egalitarian and did not encourage Black leadership. While not particularly successful, Nashoba lasted longer than some of Owen’s White socialist utopian communes. Nonetheless, according to DeFilippis, the history of nineteenth-century Black “organized communities” provides the “roots for the emergence of community ownership” and community control in the United States (2004, 38).
Mutual-Aid and Beneficial Societies
Collective practice and leadership among independent African Americans was more evident in the more prevalent and very successful African American mutual-aid and beneficial societies. The majority of early African American cooperative economic activity revolved around benevolent societies, beneficial societies, mutual-aid societies, and, more formally and more commonly, mutual insurance companies. Many of these societies were integrally connected with religious institutions or people with the same religious affiliation, and they established educational, health, social welfare, moral, and economic services for their members. Chief among the activities was care for widows and children, the elderly, and the poor, and provision of burial services.4 Woodson describes a “tendency toward mutual helpfulness” among the enslaved and notes that free Negroes in the South “were well known for their mutual helpfulness.” In addition, “wherever Negroes had their own churches benevolence developed as the handmaiden of religion” (1929, 202).
The purpose of these mutual-aid societies was to “provide people with the basic needs of everyday life—clothing, shelter, and emotional and physical sustenance” (Jones 1985, 127). In addition to social welfare functions, many of the societies promoted temperance and other middle-class and Christian values; but they also protected fugitives and free African Americans from kidnappers (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010, 116). Berry notes that “African Americans had long been in the habit of forming mutual assistance associations, providing help when government refused to help. For African Americans, such mediating institutions historically provided the only available social assistance” (2005, 61). Similarly, Weare contends that mutual aid was a “pragmatic response to social and economic needs. In many cases autonomous Negro societies were organized only after Black leaders were rebuffed when they sought to join existing white groups” (1993, 8).
According to Hine, Hine and Harrold, “the earliest Black community institutions were mutual aid societies” (2010, 116). Du Bois notes their large numbers and wide ramifications by 1907 (1907, 93). Berry calls mutual aid “one component of the broad effort at community care among African Americans, which included secret societies, homes for children, old-age homes, and a flexible family system for individuals throughout the life cycle” (2005, 64). In addition, Black Freemason societies united Black men regionally and were a major social movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010, 117). Fraternities and secret societies were equally plentiful and influential. Woodson observes that “while they were secret in procedure and benevolent in purpose these fraternal agencies offered unusual opportunities for community effort, the promotion of racial consciousness, and the development of leadership” (1929, 205).
Most scholars of this era (Berry 2005; Weare 1993; Pollard 1980; Woodson 1929; Du Bois 1898 and 1907, for example) note the connection between mutual aid and religious activity. As Du Bois observed:
Of the 236 efforts and institutions reported in this inquiry [about practical insurance and benevolence], seventy-nine are churches. Next in importance to churches come the Negro secret societies. . . . Of the organizations reported ninety-two were secret societies—some, branches