Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard (review)

Growing up in the Southeastern United States, where conservative voices tend to dominate the political discourse, I never encountered a cooperative until college. Even then, my experiences were limited to cooperatives dominated by progressive, college-educated, urban white people, and I saw these demographic trends as the norm in cooperative practices. While this image comes from my personal experience, I fear that cooperative practice in North America is often dismissed as an exclusive option for privileged people with the means to refuse the status quo. Collective Courage flips this assumption on its head.

Based on persistent archival digging that lasted over ten years, Jessica Gordon Nembhard provides an inspiring and detailed historical account of the cooperative movement among African Americans. Her research reveals that the struggle for Black economic independence and success has involved persistent advocacy for, and development of, cooperatives of all types, especially in the South. Though this history is typically left out of most accounts of Black social movements, Nembhard demonstrates that cooperative economic configurations were an important part of the thought of many prominent Black leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Ella Jo Baker, and A. Philip Randolph, among others. She suggests that the Black cooperative movement remains largely forgotten because these efforts were often short-lived due to lack or mismanagement of resources and sabotage by white competitors, while more successful examples in many cases ran under the radar of mainstream white society.

Nembhard begins the book with an explanation of what a cooperative is, differentiating between consumer-owned, producer-owned, and worker-owned cooperatives. She discusses the historical roots of cooperative practice in the African American struggle, beginning with pre-Civil War efforts to collectively escape slavery and buy the right to freedom. The nineteenth century also witnessed the proliferation of Black mutual aid societies to share funds for necessary services, like hospitalization, funerals, food, and clothing, as well as the development of utopian agricultural communes.

In the late nineteenth century, during the populist movement, hundreds of worker cooperatives were developed with the help of labor union advocacy organizations, and some agrarian organizations were also created to pool resources for rural African Americans to access credit and equipment to support their economic independence. The first black cooperative businesses based on the Rochdale Principles of Cooperation, the internationally-recognized principles for cooperative practice, also emerged in this period. The earliest examples were mutual insurance companies that grew out of the earlier mutual aid societies. A number of agricultural cooperatives (e.g. a jointly-owned cotton mill), grocery stores, schools, and credit unions were also developed following the Rochdale Principles in the late nineteenth century for—and by—African Americans.

The peak of Black cooperative development came in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Out of necessity, African Americans created many types of cooperatives across the United States, including factories, stores, housing cooperatives, credit unions, and others, supported by churches, universities, as well as national networks and conferences that encouraged knowledge exchange between cooperatives. Another wave of cooperative development came in the 1960s and early 1970s, especially in the rural South, as federal grant funding supported efforts to establish agricultural cooperatives during the Johnson Administration, and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) was created to connect agricultural cooperatives, credit unions, and other cooperatives in the region. Persisting and growing since 1967, the FSC remains the largest African American cooperative development organization in the United States, supporting Black economic development through cooperatives even when the federal government has been hostile to their efforts.

Collective Courage is more than a simple linear narrative; it also includes chapters dedicated to important themes in the development of Black cooperative economic thought and practice. Nembhard gives special attention to the role of African American women in cooperative development, dedicating a chapter to their...