Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice

In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nebhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since Du Bois’ 1907 Economic Cooperation among Negroes has there been a full-length, nation-wide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twentieth century. Many of the players are well-known in the history of the African American experience: W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Women’s Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes Cooperative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history provides a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard pores over newspapers, period magazines and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets and income statements; scholarly books, memoirs and biographies to reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. She also uses mixed methods economic analysis of quantitative and qualitative data, theoretical analysis and applied theory to understand the effectiveness of the particular practices and/or strategies documented. Themes of economic independence, the critical role of women and youth in the African American cooperative movement, and the use of cooperatives by Black organizations for community economic development are interwoven into a linear treatment of the development of cooperatives among African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.