This story of African American cooperative economic activity is told partly in chronological order and partly thematically. Themes such as economic independence, economic protection and stabilization in the face of discrimination and violence, women’s roles, education and training, youth involvement, and community economic development are interwoven into a linear treatment of the development of African American cooperatives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is the first book-length work to connect the dots of African American cooperative endeavors.
A note on terminology. I use the terms African American and Black interchangeably, although I understand that there are nuanced differences between the two terms and how they are used. I also capitalize the word Black when I use it as a racial category. I use the word cooperative, no hyphen (as opposed to the short form, co-op, always hyphenated), except when quoting or referring to organizations that use the hyphen, as some of the cooperatives discussed in this book do, especially until the 1940s.
Organization of the Book
This book is divided into three parts. Part I, “Early African American Cooperative Roots,” covers collective benevolence, grassroots economic organizing, cooperative agriculture, and union cooperative ownership through the early twentieth century. The specific, deliberate development (or attempts at development) of Rochdale cooperatives among African Americans is the subject of part II, “Deliberative Cooperative Economic Development,” which covers Black co-op federations and agency-driven co-op development from about 1917 to 1975. Part III, “Twentieth-Century Practices, Twenty-First-Century Solutions,” consists of two chapters that pull this history together and attempt to provide a guide for pursuing cooperative development in the twenty-first century.
Chapter 1, “Early Black Economic Cooperation: Intentional Communities, Communes, and Mutual Aid,” analyzes the mutual-aid movement among African Americans and the development of communal societies. The mutual-aid movement involved a large proportion of the Black community and continued for centuries. I chronicle the myriad Black mutual-aid societies that sprang up during and after enslavement and examine their accomplishments, effectiveness, and the special role of African American women in founding and running them. Examples include the Independent Order of Saint Luke (Maryland and Virginia), the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association (Tennessee), founded by African American women, and the Free African Society (Pennsylvania). These early forms of collective ownership, buying in bulk, and charitable service were the precursors of mutual insurance companies, social service agencies, and joint-stock companies. They were also often the basis of early Black intentional communities. DeFilippis (2004) credits the Black “organized communities” of the nineteenth century as one of the most significant roots of the modern community-control movement. Chapter 1 thus highlights important elements of the early Black self-help communal settlements and intentional communities, both before and after the Civil War, that were often inspired by or part of the European and U.S. utopian commune movement. The contributions to this movement of African American abolitionists such as Sojourner Truth, David Ruggles, and Frederick Douglass are also noted.
Chapter 2, “From Economic Independence to Political Advocacy: Cooperation and the Nineteenth-Century Black Populist Movement,” focuses on African American involvement in early populist movements for grassroots empowerment, particularly in rural areas of the United States after the Civil War. This chapter discusses the struggle for agricultural independence from sharecropping through cooperative ownership and African American economic solidarity, for example, in the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-operative Union. The American populist movement was highly segregated. This chapter looks at African Americans’ struggle to have a voice in that movement, to have their issues addressed, and to create agricultural, marketing, and industrial cooperatives through populist organizations and unions (such as the Knights of Labor and the Cooperative Workers of America) during the late nineteenth century.
Mutual insurance companies were the earliest cooperative-like incorporated businesses in the United States for both Blacks and Whites.9 The Grand United Order of the True Reformers (Richmond, Virginia) and the Independent Order of Saint Luke (Richmond, Virginia) are examples of African American fraternal and mutual-aid societies that created mutual insurance companies. Their mutual insurance companies, such as North Carolina Mutual (Raleigh), stores, and banks are discussed in chapter 3, “Expanding the Tradition: Early African American–Owned ‘Cooperative’ Businesses.” In addition, starting in the late nineteenth century, African Americans organized cooperatively owned and democratically governed enterprises that followed the “Rochdale Principles of Cooperation,” first set out by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in Rochdale, England, in 1844 and adopted by the International Co-operative Alliance in 1895. Hope (1940) refers to these as Rochdale cooperatives, and I follow his tradition. The first such cooperatives were farm co-ops and cooperative marketing boards, consumer cooperative grocery stores, cooperative schools, and credit unions. The Mercantile Cooperative Company (Ruthville, Virginia) is the earliest detailed example I found of an African American Rochdale cooperative. Black capitalism was a strategy of racial economic solidarity and cooperation, as was Negro joint-stock ownership. This chapter looks at the businesses of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement in New York; the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company and the Lexington Savings Bank in Baltimore; and the Coleman Manufacturing Company in Concord, North Carolina.
Chapter 4, “Strategy, Advocacy, and Practice: Black Study Circles and Co-op Education on the Front Lines,” begins part II of this volume. This chapter documents the strategic importance of education to cooperative development and the sustainability of cooperatives. The study-circle strategy used by most African Americans in the early stages of starting a cooperative is highlighted, along with the importance of self-education as an economic resource in cooperatives. The Negro Cooperative Guild, though short-lived, was an early example of the deliberate use of a national study circle to inspire Black cooperative business development around the country. The variety of ways in which Black co-ops educate their members and communities, particularly about cooperative economics, democratic participation, and business development, are identified, with a focus on the education program of the Consumers’ Cooperative Trading Company in Gary, Indiana, and the Ladies’ Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
The Young Negroes’ Co-operative League is the focus of chapter 5. The 1930s were an active time for cooperative development for both Blacks and Whites. The YNCL, founded in December 1930 by twenty-five or thirty African American youths in response to a call by George Schuyler (Schuyler 1930b, 1932, n.d.), first published in the Pittsburgh Courier, was strong in five cities by the early 1930s. Several cooperatives were developed through the league. The leadership of both Schuyler and Ella Baker (the