The role of the African-American community as a catalyst for change has long been the subject of study among academics from a variety of disciplines. In her new book, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, an associate professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development at John Jay College, City University of New York, draws back the curtain on the ‘hidden history' of African-American cooperative ventures (1). While previous analyses contend that cooperatives have largely been short-lived failures, Gordon Nembhard provides an important corrective. Her work places cooperatives within a broad historical context and gives merit to the tremendous challenges and violence these ventures faced in communities throughout the United States. Drawing upon an array of sources and anecdotal leads the author surveys a wide spectrum of cooperative economic enterprises in multiple regions across the country from 1780–2012. Painstakingly fitting these pieces together she presents a new mosaic that enriches our understanding of these diverse entities, which evolved as a vital alternative to the market failures of the capitalist system.
Market failures, in this analysis, are not simply a matter of supply and demand, but rather the end result of enslavement, racism, discrimination, intimidation, and violence that permeate African-American life. Capitalism's central tenants encouraged competition and individual accomplishment, but turned a blind eye to the myriad ways in which African-Americans were excluded from fair participation in the economic system. In rebuking capitalism, cooperatives carved out their own niche placing the values of survival, solidarity, and cooperation at the forefront of their effort. Yet the full scope and value of these ventures remains an unexamined chapter of the African-American freedom struggle.
The author notes that three factors obscure the legacy of cooperative organizing action. First, many of these ventures were small in scale, short-lived, and, as a result, their records were not preserved. Second, in resisting the entrenched racial prejudice and economic discrimination of white society, cooperatives were targeted for violent reprisal and destruction, further minimizing their presence in the historical record. Third, and perhaps most significant, cooperatives were designed to function outside the world of white business. W.E.B. DuBois and other intellectuals advocated a policy of racial economic segregation in which African-Americans voluntarily removed themselves from economic competition, practiced solidarity, and focused on new collective efforts dedicated to self-sufficiency, self-determination, and autonomy. These efforts flew under the radar of white society to ensure their own safety and stability. Ironically, cooperatives thrived on the very economic marginalization they sought to redress. Their small size and low profile were designed to ward off the power of white racism in order to create their own prosperous internal economy.
Gordon Nembhard, a political economist with deep roots in the world of community economic development, turned to the tools of the historian to craft this study. Her work is rooted in the proceedings of the twelfth Atlanta Conference, a landmark moment in the history of African-American cooperatives. Organized by W.E.B. DuBois in 1907, the conference examined the question of ‘Economic Co-Operation Among Negro Americans' and elevated the stature of cooperative ventures, contending they promised more benefits to marginalized people than competition in the free market. Anchored by the conference's proposition, Gordon Nembhard's work explores the movement's origins and follows its evolution into the twenty-first century.
The author traces the cooperative movement's earliest roots to the intentional communities, communes, and mutual aid societies of the antebellum and post-Civil War era. She notes that many of these organizations ascribed to a Jeffersonian agrarian vision and sought to promote white middle-class values and culture. Although the joint stock companies, maroon outlaw communities, and fraternal organizations of the period were largely paternalistic and isolated, they were among the first to promote strategies centering on solidarity and cooperation. Over time these practices became a cornerstone of the African-American struggle against slavery, poverty, and the debt peonage of the sharecropping system.
Local conditions and larger economic factors shaped the development of cooperatives which reached their peak in the turbulent economy of the Great Depression. While this catastrophic economic event transformed daily life for most Americans, it devastated impoverished communities. In order to survive African-Americans responded by creating record numbers of cooperative endeavors in both rural and urban settings. The Knights of Labor played a crucial role during this period, endorsing integration within unions and recognizing the important role cooperative enterprises played to uplift people of all races and economic backgrounds. This development is telling in several respects. First, it suggests that capitalism tends to reject pluralism within the workforce. Second, dire economic need and strategic union organizing are a potent means for securing the economic security of poor and working people. Third, cooperatives tend to flourish in places where capitalism fails.
This account, however, leaves the reader craving more details about the cooperatives’ inner workings. With limited archival resources at her disposal, the author was only able to provide minor profiles of each enterprise. These portraits offer only a glimpse into the varied ways in which local people challenged economic inequality and built their own networks of resistance from such varied industries as the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company in Baltimore, Maryland to the Freedom Quilting Bee in Alberta, Alabama. It is true, however, that most of these ventures were limited in size and scope, subject to fluctuations within regional economies, and vulnerable to mismanagement, undercapitalization, and competition. Gordon Nembhard moves beyond the simplistic ledger balance assessments of the past. Her qualitative analysis highlights the ways in which the foundations for building a cooperative movement influenced the larger struggles for social, economic, and political equality.
More than a mere economic strategy designed to promote stability, cooperatives provided an important multiplier effect within the communities they served. As an organizing instrument they brought together dedicated, like-minded people. They developed a new spirit of community solidarity, instilled a new sense of camaraderie, created new conduits for profit sharing, and assured the delivery of high quality goods and services. Cooperatives also served as an important leadership incubator for many prominent African-American leaders. Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and A. Philip Randolph began their careers working in cooperative ventures where they refined their vision of a more just and equitable economy. This work provided these leaders with an organizational blueprint for challenging the oppressive social and economic structures of American society. Valuing group accomplishments over individual success, cooperatives have played, and continue to play, an important role in developing the resilience of African-American communities.
From their earliest days, cooperatives were designed as learning organizations. They widely promoted the creation of study circles, committees of correspondence, and on-the-job educational training programs. They tended to establish themselves in close proximity to historically black colleges and universities. Here, the resources of the local and academic communities combined to study economic inequality and design business ventures that could profitably provide the goods and services that were in short supply. Sharing this knowledge with others was a primary challenge in expanding the scale of the movement. Regional organizations published start up manuals, essays on best practices, and articles that profiled the success and failures of cooperatives all across the country. While replication remained the central goal, cooperatives were well aware that they faced an uphill battle. Cooperatives were rooted in a particular place and economic context. As a result solutions had to be tailored to fit each locale. Yet the larger task remained supplanting the dominance of the capitalist system in most Americans’ thinking. Many African-Americans preferred to work within the existing system and were skeptical of the viability of the cooperative venture, which they perceived to be a foreign model incompatible with American values. Cooperative organizations publicized the value and efficacy of their work, hailing it as a means to not only stabilize communities but enrich multiple dimensions of African-American life.
Gordon Nembhard ably demonstrates that while the African-American cooperative movement was small in scale, it shaped many of the major movements for black liberation that followed. Central to this argument is the work of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). While the UNIA was technically a joint stock corporation, it became the largest African-American political organization in the twentieth century. It promoted a pan-African vision of cooperation, fought for workplace democracy, and practiced a form of ‘community feminism' (71).
In a moving coda to her analysis, Gordon Nembhard acknowledges how the success of these ventures provoked competition, retaliation, and, at times, violence. Nearly a century later, Marcus Garvey's conviction for mail fraud and lack of financial transparency still taints the African-American community's historical memory of cooperative economics. Overt actions such as the Leflore Massacre of 1889, in which three companies of federal troops, white merchants, and local posses killed nearly one-hundred black supporters of the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-operative Union in Mississippi, highlights the lengths to which white society would go to maintain their control of the economic system (56–57). Reprisals, however, were not always violent in nature. Gordon Nembhard points to a disturbing pattern of federal investigation and bureaucratic interference in her discussion of the Nixon Administration's prolonged investigation of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.
Violent attacks and prolonged investigations by government agents undercut the cooperative movement's visibility, credibility, and accomplishments. These reprisals limited the movement's growth and created a new generation of skeptics who harbored the belief that any attempt to circumvent the capitalist system would be met with harassment and destruction. The impact of these historical episodes continues to resonate within the African-American community today. They contribute to a shared fear that any effort at economic empowerment will eventually be met with government retaliation. This is accompanied by the mistaken belief that cooperative projects are prone to embezzlement and mismanagement.
Cooperatives empowered black communities in ways that capitalism could not. Women and children played a central role in expanding and promoting the power and efficacy of the movement. Halena Wilson, a virtually unknown founding mother of the cooperative movement, is profiled in compelling detail. What began as a humble effort at civic engagement and charity, led to Wilson's election as the first president of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Ladies’ Auxiliary. Wilson's work provides new insight into the organizational efforts of women who joined with organized labor and initiated a series of cooperative economic enterprises. While men often occupied the formal seats of power, portraits of Maggie Lena Walker, Ella Jo Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Estelle Witherspoon, Rebecca Johnson, Linda Leaks, and Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo assert that women played critical roles organizing, managing, owning, and developing cooperative businesses all across the country.
While the United Nations declared 2012 to be the ‘international year of cooperatives', many Americans know little about this model (1). As wealth and income inequality reach all time highs in the United States, cooperatives remain a viable alternative for empowering the most vulnerable workers in our economy. Gordon Nembhard's timely study resuscitates the cooperative movement's rich history of initiating small changes that dramatically impact individual lives. With economic competition spreading all across the globe, cooperatives continue to promote economic development in places where the cost-benefit analyses of large corporations fear to tread. They are an essential part of building an equitable economy for a new century.
Collective Courage represents an important first step in recovering and recording centuries of African-American cooperative economic development. It argues that for many African-Americans, the American dream of individual accomplishment and wealth accumulation is little more than a false bill of goods. Gordon Nembhard reminds us of the important tradition of local, non-hierarchical, cooperative ownership among African-Americans, which can serve as a corrective to our present form of capitalism. The success of the ‘Jackson Rising New Economies Conference' in May 2014 attests to the fact that cooperatives will continue to play an important role in generating income, training new leaders, stabilizing communities, and providing high quality goods and services for those left behind by our economic system.