African American Cooperatives Curriculum
Teaching Idea by Jessica Gordon Nembhard
From the Babson-Equal Exchange Cooperative Curriculum. This contains excerpts from Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice along with a study guide including learning objectives, additional readings, and learning activities.
Learning Objectives
To learn about the various attempts at and successes of African American cooperative ownership throughout US history
To understand the opportunities and challenges offered by cooperative ownership for African Americans and consider the circumstances under which cooperative ownership has been beneficial to African American communities, Black women and/or Black youth
To analyze the barriers and challenges to cooperative ownership among African Americans, and to recognize the role played by unfair competition, racism and white supremacist terrorism in undermining Black cooperatives.
To identify the leaders of and explore the contours of the African American Cooperative Movement, its development, periods of strength, and relationship to the Civil Rights Movement
African American Cooperatives: Overview
Cooperatives have played an important role in forwarding the rights and prospects of African Americans. Cooperatives are examples of democratic economic enterprises that provide a mechanism for pooling resources, increasing benefits, and sharing profits. Cooperative ownership can contribute to anti-poverty strategies and community building strategies, especially when market activities do not provide for the needs of a community. Throughout history, among all groups and people in every country, cooperatives have facilitated economic development, stabilization, and independence, often for those who have been economically marginalized. African Americans have a long but hidden history of cooperative economic thought and practice (Gordon Nembhard 2004).
A larger proportion of Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and some Asian American groups compared with Whites in the U.S. are poor and unemployed, have lower wealth levels and lower business ownership, poorer health, and higher incarceration levels, in good times as well as bad. Marginalization forces subaltern groups such as African Americans to find alternative economic solutions. Forced segregation made it imperative that African Americans join together economically, because the mainstream economy was exploitative, discriminatory, and exclusionary. Voluntary segregation was often the way to maintain economic independence and control. Self-help efforts – mutual aid societies, maroons, communal societies, for example — provide a chance to design and manage needed services in culturally, racially, and geographically sensitive ways. In the early centuries in the US, enslaved as well as free African Americans pooled their money to buy their own and their family members’ freedom. “Freedmen” established mutual societies to pool meager resources to help cover costs of illness and death for example. They created communities, enclaves, Black businesses and other economic activity insulated from racial discrimination and neglect (see Gordon Nembhard 2014).
African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic governance throughout the history of the U.S., similar to their counterparts around the world. Cooperatives contribute to community economic development because they anchor economic activity and recirculate money and other resources within the community/neighborhood, facilitate joint ownership and asset building, practice democratic economic participation, and provide jobs and meaningful work to community members. As such they address market failure, marginalization and discrimination. Also cooperatives provide education and training to members and the community, usually with some continuity, develop leadership among members, and usually promote environmental sustainability (Gordon Nembhard 2015, and 2014).
Cooperative economic development solves many problems created by market failure, economic discrimination, and under development. Cooperative businesses are group-centered, needs-based, and asset building local development models based on pooling of resources, democratic economic participation, and profit sharing. They are locally controlled, internally driven democratic institutions that promote group learning, economic interdependence, consolidation of resources, development of assets and protection of people and the environment. Cooperatives stabilize their communities - increasing economic activity, creating good jobs, increasing benefits and wages, and encouraging civic participation. Community-based, cooperatively-owned enterprises are characterized by greater community input and participation in the planning, development and governance of commercially-viable socially-responsible businesses. Cooperatives provide a mechanism for low-resourced people with few traditional opportunities, to create new economic opportunities for themselves and their co-workers and/or neighbors (Gordon Nembhard 2015, 2014; Fairbairn, Bold, Fulton, Hammond Ketilson, Ish 1991).
In many cases African Americans chose cooperative ownership when cooperation made sense, was a rational strategy to pursue, but also when all other avenues for economic activity were closed. It was often risky politically as well as economically to try a different path - especially one that was considered a way to circumvent white monopolies, and to be anti-capitalistic, if not outright socialist or communist. It took courage to shop at the cooperative exchange or the co-op store when white land owners and store owners would do anything to crush the competition (Gordon Nembhard 2018). Yet African Americans did just that over and over again throughout history.
Telling this Black cooperative history is also a retelling of African American civil rights history – a reconstructing of African American history and civil rights activity using as lens the Black cooperative movement (Gordon Nembhard 2011). Many of the players are the same. Many of the great (even famous) African American thinkers, movers, and shakers were also leaders in the Black cooperative movement – including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ella Jo Baker, A Philip Randolph, George Schuyler, Marcus Garvey (and his Universal Negro Improvement Association), Nannie Helen Burroughs, and the Black Panther Party, the Student National Coordinating Committee, and at times the Nation of Islam (Gordon Nembhard 2014, 2004; and Shipp 2000). That part of their history and thought, however, has been mostly left out or ignored - until my research on the history of African American cooperatives. Adding information from the Black cooperative movement revitalizes the telling of the African American experience and increases our understanding of African American agency and political economic organizing (Gordon Nembhard 2011).