How Co-ops Helped Produce Foot Soldiers for Civil Rights

[OneGrassRoot]

This is a 2014 Colorlines interview with economist and community economic development expert Jessica Gordon Nembhard regarding her book "Collective Courage: A History of African-American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice." Gordon Nembhard is a professor in Africana Studies at John Jay College in New York City.

I find the history of co-ops in the US fascinating, especially in contrast to how they're perceived today and, sadly (though understandably), how segregated they tend to be.



First, what is cooperative economics and how early does this practice begin among African-Americans?

As early as the mid-1700s. I actually start the book with a mutual aid society in Philadelphia that came together to help members bury their dead. Mutual aid societies were formed by people who couldn't afford to do something important in life like bury their dead or take care of their sick. So each member would put in money, say $1 a year, and pool their resources so that they could bury their loved ones or, in another case, hire a nurse for a town that doesn't have one. Cooperatives take many forms, from housing co-ops to consumer-owned groceries to worker-owned pig farming. There is no individual ownership. Rather, everyone is in it together and owns together. There're usually rules about how the money can be used and all members participate in regular study groups. That fosters democratic participation both in the co-op and the community. [And by the way,] those same people who formed that burial society later went on to found the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Many people are familiar with "Black Wall Street," often used to describe Tulsa, Okla. or other thriving early 20th century towns. Were there co-ops in those towns, too?

Yes. In fact, some of them were actually practicing cooperative economics rather than capitalism. In one Miss. town, they organized a pig farmers co-op, for example. And even in Tulsa with its individually-owned businesses there was still some level of unofficial economic cooperation. For example, everyone patronized the black-owned grocery store or bank so that sense of solidarity carried over.

Another example comes from W.E.B. DuBois who, all his life advocated for the cooperative model. He describes as a co-op in his 1907 book on the subject, one business founded just after the Civil War by members of the black middle-class in Baltimore. They had gotten together and bought a shipyard because the white shipyards would not employ black workers.

Let's talk about that civil rights link. Why isn't it more widely known?

I've been wondering about that, too. And in fact one of the things I found is that there's more of a connection between black cooperatives and civil rights than there is between black cooperatives and capitalism. I think there're a couple of reasons. In the U.S. co-ops are often linked with hippies, communism or socialism and back in the 1950s, just after the McCarthy era, black leaders knew they couldn't talk about either and be listened to. So there was an official avoidance of the subject of co-ops. Second, there was a lot of resistance from capitalists. White unions in the late 1800s were being sabotaged and certainly blacks got the same resistance as well because co-ops gave them more economic control and power. So by necessity, even if you were involved in co-ops it had to be as clandestine as possible. And third, people, including many blacks, just wouldn't accept civil rights if it included language about economic rights. I once heard Andrew Young give a talk at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and he said that in the '60s, they deliberately decided not to talk about economic co-ops or economic justice but to focus on political and voting rights. It was too dangerous to talk about the former.


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