There were disparate Black agrarian groups before the CFNACU, such as the Colored Farmers Association in Texas (mid-1870s), the Colored Grange of Tennessee (1880), and the Negro Alliance of Arkansas (1882) (Ali 2003). The Mississippi Union Leagues were also “hatcheries of radical economic experiments” (Woods 2007, 55). The Colored Agricultural Wheels expressed Black populism in the mid-1880s. “Colored Wheels were non-partisan agrarian groups that focused on economic cooperation while pressing for economic and political reforms,” according to Ali, and by the late 1880s were spreading in Alabama and Tennessee as well as Arkansas (2003, 45).
According to Berry, in the 1880s, depressed economic conditions for poor farmers led them to join radical agrarian organizations (2005, 26–27). Radicals preached solidarity for poor Black and White farmers. The Populist Party tried to protect African Americans to ensure the equal application of voting procedures in 1892. Democrats forced African Americans who worked for them to vote Democratic and used riots and murder to maintain political power. “The Populists feared that they would not always be able to control African Americans if they were permitted to behave as allies and not subordinates, and they also feared Democratic control of black voters and efforts to disfranchise poor whites. Poor whites, the planter class, and industrialists joined together in forcing African Americans out of the political arena in the 1890s” (Berry 2005, 27). Similarly, Ali observes that “the inherent conflict between the poor African American agrarian base of black Populism (drawn from the approximately 92% of the rural southern black population that was virtually landless) and the relatively affluent white leadership of the Populist movement would continue into the early 1890s” (2003, 56–57). Violence and intimidation were frequently used to suppress the growth of Black populism, as the movement spearheaded plantation strikes.
Woods describes this period as one in which African Americans wanted to dismantle the plantation regime, establish self-governing communities, and become landowners, both individually and collectively. By the 1880s, a mass movement of Blacks and Whites had arisen under the populist banner. Populists identified northern industrial capitalists and southern plantation monopolists as “enemies of cooperatively based community development” (Woods 1998, 7). African Americans pushed their community-development agenda by building schools, establishing new towns, buying land, and protesting the denial of civil and human rights, even though they were essentially voteless and increasingly segregated. “Out of necessity,” Woods observes, “many of those who remained in the South focused again on the land and labor reform agenda by organizing rural unions to end peonage, to improve wages, and to end the thievery associated with year-end settlements” (9).
This is the context in which the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-operative Union matured and operated. It tried to promote political action among African Americans to ensure economic opportunity and stability (Ali 2003). “Dominated by small land-owners, this movement engaged in independent party politics while simultaneously building an economic infrastructure for a new society” (Woods 1998, 8).
The Black populist movement was heavily influenced by the attempts of racially integrated unions to develop a cooperative commonwealth in the late nineteenth century. The CFNACU pulled together elements of the Black populist movement in the 1880s and ’90s. The colored alliances also continued the cooperative development that the Knights of Labor began. From the beginning, the CFNACU presented itself as a mutual-benefit organization devoted to improving the lives of Black farmers and agrarian laborers through education and economic cooperation. Its members became as militant as the Knights of Labor and led “some of the most ambitious strikes and boycotts,” which made Black populism “even more of a threat to the establishment” (Ali 2003, 61n107).
The Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-operative Union
As the earlier populist organizations disbanded and went underground, the CFNACU began to pull together grassroots efforts and form a network of regional and national organizations. Like the mutual-aid societies, many were connected with and relied on churches (Ali 2003, 70). The first Negro alliance was organized in Arkansas in 1882 (76n3). Members of local chapters shared agricultural techniques and innovations and coordinated cooperative efforts for planting and harvesting (77). Similarly, in Macon, Georgia, at a meeting of 350 African Americans, a Reverend Love offered a resolution to form “cooperative associations, cooperative farms, and storehouses.”4
Officially founded by J. J. Shuffer, H. L. Spencer, and R. M. Humphrey in 1886 in Houston County, Texas, the CFNACU spread to establish chapters in every state in the South (Curl 2009, 111; Holmes n.d.). In March 1888, the alliance held its first national meeting in Lovelady, Texas (Humphrey 1891; Miller 1972; Spriggs 1979; Ali 2003). The CFNACU consolidated several Black-focused agrarian organizations in the South—the Colored Agricultural Wheels, the Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, and the Florida Farmers Union5—into a regional coalition. “The focus of these early groups was on relief through collectivizing resources, and collective bargaining through boycotts and strikes” (Ali 2005, 5). By 1891 the CFNACU boasted a membership of more than one million (Ali 2003), though, according to Curl, the alliance “had one and a quarter million members, making it the largest-ever organization of black Americans, most of them sharecroppers and tenant farmers” (2009, 111). Most accounts, however, suggest that the total was closer to four or five hundred thousand members (Holmes 1973). In any case, the CFNACU was indisputably the largest African American organization of its time. While its local leaders were Black, the state and regional organizers were largely White, headed by the White founder Reverend Humphrey, who was general superintendent. Whites were able to organize openly in places where Blacks would be physically attacked (Curl 2009, 112).
The CFNACU was a self-help organization that encouraged members to work hard and sacrifice to uplift themselves. Some state chapters raised money to keep Black public schools open for longer terms, founded academies, and solicited funds to help the sick and disabled. In many ways, the CFNACU was another mutual-aid society. But it was also formed to increase Black political participation, and it advocated a political agenda. It often mirrored its White counterpart, the Southern Farmers’ Alliance (a branch of the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union, referred to as the Southern Alliance), in terms of philosophy and program, supporting most of the same policies (Holmes 1973). For example, in 1890 the CFNACU supported the Southern Alliance’s subtreasury plan, hoping that it would provide low-interest loans for farmers and high prices for agricultural produce (Holmes 1973, 269; Reynolds 2002; Ali 2003). The CFNACU also supported policies that the Southern Alliance did not, such as the Lodge election bill to provide federal protection to safeguard voting rights in the South, and the 1891 cotton pickers’ strike.
While some Black members owned small farms, many were sharecroppers and field hands on White plantations. The CFNACU urged members to improve their farming methods and learn new techniques, purchase their own land and homes, and improve their education (Holmes 1973, 268). It promoted collectivizing resources