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The origins of a new form of regional development in the Delta are to be found within the region itself among the scattered, misplaced, and often forgotten movements, projects, and agendas of its African American communities and of other marginalized groups. Generation after generation, ethnic and class alliances arose in the region with the aim of expanding social and economic democracy, only to be ignored, dismissed, and defeated. These defeats were followed by arrogant attempts to purge such heroic movements from both historical texts and popular memory. Yet even in defeat these movements transformed the policies of the plantation bloc and informed daily life, community-building activities, and subsequent movements. Within the unreconstructed oral and written records of these arrested movements resides the knowledge upon which to construct new relationships and new regional structures of equality. —woods (1998, 4) The pooling of resources in one form or another has helped solve the problems of other groups almost since the beginning of time and it is only logical to conclude that the same principle can be made to help solve the problems of our own racial group. —wilson (1942a, 2) I propose as the next step which the American Negro can give to the world a new and unique gift. We have tried song and laughter and with rare good humor a bit condescending the world has received it; we have given the world work, hard, backbreaking labor and the world has let black John Henry die breaking his heart to beat the machine. It is now our business to give the world an example of intelligent cooperation so that when the new industrial commonwealth comes we can go into it as an experienced people and not again be left on the outside as mere beggars. . . . If leading the way as intelligent cooperating consumers, we rid ourselves of the ideas of a price system and become pioneer servants of the common good, we can enter the new city as men and not mules. —du bois (1933c, 162–63) PartThree twentieth-century practices, twenty-first-century solutions 190 practices and solutions In the transitions from enslavement to wage labor, from industrialization to the postindustrial information age, African American and other subaltern populations held little control over the economic processes of change, or the assets required for success.1 As a result, many subaltern communities are underdeveloped, marginalized, and underserved. Persuad and Lusane note that “benefits have gone disproportionately to those who strategically manage and control capital” (2000, 27), even in what is called the “new economy .” Economic inequality and discrimination at all levels of society are well documented (see, e.g., Darity and Mason 1998). At the same time, subaltern populations have been instrumental in contributing to the successes of each era—performing much of the hard labor, providing productive services, and inventing new technologies. Twenty-first-century solutions to reducing poverty and increasing subaltern groups’ control of capital require creativity, flexibility, and diversity—the solutions cannot afford to be exclusive or exploitive . Throughout history, members of subaltern populations have wanted to control resources, income, and assets. Rather than continue to be “beggars” and recipients of inappropriate and outmoded models of industrial and economic development imposed by others, subaltern populations can and sometimes do use alternative economic models to fashion their own economy. Part III of this book explores the ways in which African Americans have used their own community-based democratic enterprises to create economic opportunities and stabilize their communities. The African American cooperative movement had started to revive by the 1960s. Co-ops, sometimes quietly, became intricately connected to the efforts of civil rights organizations and the Black power movement in the urban North, West, and South, and in Black struggles for economic independence in rural areas. The later twentieth-century urban projects used cooperatives as part of a larger strategy of Black empowerment, and while they were often deliberate about creating cooperatives, co-op development was a minor aspect of a larger strategy. Chapter 9 provides a brief history of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, a cooperative support and development organization focused on African American and low-income rural cooperative economic development and land ownership. The FSC/LAF is the only existing African American regional or national cooperative organization in the United States. This chapter also looks at some relatively recent efforts of the FSC/LAF to develop and sustain cooperative economic activity in the South and to support Black farmers. The...

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