GRIOTS REPUBLIC - AN URBAN BLACK TRAVEL MAG - SEPTEMBER 2016

the civil rights movement.
In my research for Collective Courage: A History
of African American Cooperative Economic
Thought and Practice, I found Black cooperatives
in every period. But the most prolific
growth was during three major periods: the
1880s, the 1930s and 40s, and the 1960s and
70s. Why? What those periods had in common
was, first, the idea that the fight for political
rights necessitated economic independence
and economic democracy. Second, they also
were periods when large Black organizations
promoted cooperative economics.
Survival and Economic
Independence
What was similar between the 1880s and
1930s was the need for survival in horrible
economic times. It was hard for Blacks to find
work and feed their families, so they turned to
collective economics. They had co-op grocery
stores, gas stations, health insurance, worker
co-ops and credit associations — to get loans
and do financing in the face of discrimination
and exclusion in the credit market.
The Black cooperative movement was the silent
partner, not only to the Black civil rights
movement, but also to the growing union movement
in the 1880s. Labor organizers knew
that they couldn’t forward the rights of white
workers without including Blacks, or without
thinking about controlling the means of production
through worker co-ops. Still, the 1880s
integrated labor organizations were fighting
for their rights to own the mills, factories and
farms that they were working on, and for the
right to control their own work. They developed
co-op mills, co-op farming, and co-op exchanges.
Blacks were originally involved in these
labor struggles with whites, but also started
their own organizations and established co-op
exchanges and stores to obtain the supplies
and products they needed, and credit associations
to help members people get mortgages
or buy on credit without using the racist banks
or exploitative white stores.
Several large unions, like the Knights of Labor,
had Black and white workers before they
became segregated in the early 1900s. The
Knights started several worker cooperatives
throughout the country, but were not well received
by the powers that be and most had to
go underground and then disbanded. The Colored
Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative
Union, was a Black political party, union
and cooperative development agency that started
in Texas, and spread throughout the South.
It was so controversial that their leader was
actually a white man because no Black man
could have led it without being killed. Most of
the Black organizers were underground, organizing
secretly. They lasted less than 10 years
but it was the largest Black organization until
the Universal Negro Improvement Association
in the 1920s.
The Black
cooperative
movement has
been a silent
partner to many
significant
moments in Black
history in the US
It’s interesting to see how things changed between
the 1880s and the early 1900s in terms
of cooperatives and Black and white labor relations.
The unions could not stay integrated,
segregation prevailed, and most labor unions
gave up developing co-ops because it was too
dangerous. Nobody wanted workers talking
about owning their own enterprises and getting
rid of the capitalists. Separately Blacks continued
to do various small-scale cooperative
activity on into the 20th century, as did some
separate white organizations.