The Leflore Massacre
“The troubles in Leflore County sprang largely from the attempts by blacks to improve themselves financially” (Holmes 1973, 268). In Leflore County, Mississippi, the CFNACU shared an exchange with the White Southern Alliance. One Oliver Cromwell began organizing chapters of the CFNACU in Leflore County in 1889. Holmes credits Cromwell with persuading Blacks to stop trading with local merchants and use the Farmers’ Alliance cooperative store in the nearby town of Durant. White Leflore County merchants were losing Black business (and debt) and began to try to undermine Cromwell and the CFNACU. They defamed Cromwell, threatened him, and started rumors that he had embezzled CFNACU funds. The CFNACU men rallied to defend him. The White citizens were fearful of a rebellion and requested that the governor send troops to protect them. While the rest of the account is confused and contradictory, the governor did send three companies of troops, and local armed Whites patrolled the county. It appears that local militias or posses massacred at least twenty-five Blacks. Accounts, including Black newspaper accounts, reported as many as a hundred African Americans murdered. While CFNACU men rallied, most accounts agree that they had little ammunition; no Whites were killed. The incident was not actually well publicized at the time. Neither state nor county officials took any action in response to the mass killings. “The killings in Laflore County illustrate a condition then widespread in the South” (Holmes 1973, 274).
The episode helps to explain “why the Colored Alliance was such a short-lived movement” (Holmes 1973; see also Holmes 1975 and n.d.). After the massacre, White planters held a meeting declaring that the CFNACU had overstepped its bounds. They notified the editor of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance Advocate that distribution of the newspaper to its subscribers in the county would be halted and that and any attempt to distribute the newspaper in Leflore County would be dealt with harshly. The plantation bloc leaders also ordered the cooperative store, the Durant Commercial Company, to “desist from selling goods or loaning money to the Colored Alliance or to any of its members” (Holmes 1973, 274), although it was still allowed to serve the White members of the Southern Alliance. Many of the CFNACU leaders had fled by this time if they hadn’t been killed, and the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-operative Union in Leflore County collapsed.
By 1896, all branches of the CFNACU nationwide had dissolved, although other organizations, including the Knights of Labor, continued their work (Reynolds 2002; Ali 2003).
Shift in Focus to Politics
The White and Black populist movements had similar purposes but often used different strategies. African American populists supported White programs when it served their interest, such as patronizing Southern Alliance cooperative stores and lobbying for the same legislation (Ali 2003, 120; Holmes 1973), but they pursued their own policies and actions when it did not. White alliance members tolerated Black support but were intolerant of the organization when it diverged from White aims and control. As Holmes puts it, “As long as the Colored Alliance supported the programs of the Southern Alliance, many whites tolerated its existence. But when it tried to solve problems that contributed directly to the plight of Southern blacks [bettering their economic conditions and lessening their dependence on whites], it conflicted with the economic and racial policies of the white South” (1973, 274).
Many of the CFNACU’s economic efforts were failures, and so members turned to politics. Increasing debt, lack of capital, declining crop prices, and poor wages hurt their members in particular. Also, as with earlier co-op efforts, members of these organizations usually engaged in economic activities, particularly the cooperatives, while on strike, unemployed, or experiencing economic difficulties. Resources were therefore scarce. Running businesses of any kind under these conditions was difficult. In addition, Ali notes that tactical failures, the inability to sustain cooperative stores, and limits to lobbying for agrarian reforms “convinced increasing numbers of black Populist leaders of the need to enter the political arena directly” (2003, 117). While the CFNACU “began as a strictly ‘non-partisan’ mutual benefit association focused on economic cooperation, it developed into one of the most radical organizations of the era, carrying out boycotts and strikes and ultimately helping to create an independent political party, the People’s Party” (81). When efforts to make economic change were thwarted, the CFNACU changed strategies, applying pressure on political candidates. Between 1890 and 1892 there was talk of forming a third national political party. Black and White southerners affiliated with the alliances held a series of meetings with other activists from labor, agrarian, and reform organizations (“including the northern-established Knights of Labor, which de facto became a black organization as it spread into the South”) to discuss the issue (Ali 2005, 6). By 1892 they had formed the national People’s Party, with state-based independent parties in coalition with White independents.
Thwarted Dreams
Like the Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, and other farmers’ alliances, whose vision of establishing cooperatives and exchanges was not realized, the CFNACU and its cooperative ventures were short-lived.6 At its height, the CFNACU, learning in part from the mutual-aid movement as well as the various Black populist and organized labor movements, used collective action, cooperative economics, economic solidarity, and political action to strengthen the position of Black farmers and farmworkers, form strategies for sustainable farming, and advocate for economic and political rights. All of the Black populist efforts (like the White ones) were targeted by White employers, banks, and railway owners, who sanctioned White vigilantes. Early Black cooperators suffered physical violence—even death—as well as economic sabotage. At the same time, even the unsuccessful campaigns provided invaluable lessons about economic and political organizing at the grassroots level. Both the frustrations and the small victories associated with these efforts would be remembered, and the vision of a cooperative society would continue to surround the Black civil rights and liberation movements.
Early African American–Owned “Cooperative” Businesses
Even rural communities that lacked the almost total isolation of the Sea Islands possessed a strong commitment to corporatism and a concomitant scorn for the hoarding of private possessions. . . . It is clear that these patterns of behavior were determined as much by economic necessity as by cultural “choice.” If black household members pooled their energies to make a good crop, and if communities collectively provided for their own welfare, then poverty and oppression ruled out most of the alternative strategies. Individualism was a luxury that sharecroppers simply could not afford.
—JONES (1985, 101–2)
More importantly, the Commission [the 1961 Civil Rights Commission] failed to recognize the degree to which community cooperation during the early years of the twentieth century helped move local farmers away from economic dependence on whites. Actuated by a strong sense of community, residents of Charles City County developed a diverse agricultural economy