Collective Courage
African American co-operative economics, a history largely written out.
Summary
Gordon Nembhard, an economist, wrote a history of cooperative economic activity among African Americans from the early nineteenth century to the present, assembled from archival research into organisations that mainstream economic history had not documented.
The empirical contribution is the recovery of the record itself. She documents mutual aid societies from the 1780s that provided insurance and burial benefits when commercial insurers would not serve black customers; intentional communities and land collectives; agricultural cooperatives and purchasing associations among black farmers; consumer cooperatives; credit unions and savings institutions; worker cooperatives; and the cooperative programmes attached to civil rights organisations, including those W E B Du Bois advocated and those the Federation of Southern Cooperatives ran during and after the 1960s.
The analytical argument is that cooperative organisation was a response to exclusion rather than an ideological choice. Black Americans were denied access to credit, insurance, employment and markets, and cooperatives allowed pooling of resources to obtain what individuals could not. She also documents the sustained hostility these organisations faced, including violence, credit denial and legal obstruction, which she argues explains why many did not survive rather than any failure of the cooperative model.
She covers the intellectual history, particularly Du Bois's advocacy of cooperative economics, and the debates within black political thought about economic strategy.
The book is archival history and is the most complete account of its subject. It argues a position about the viability of cooperative enterprise that readers may weigh differently, and it does not systematically compare survival rates against conventional businesses facing the same conditions. The recovery of the historical record is the durable contribution.
Key takeaways 7
- African American cooperative economic activity dates from the late eighteenth century and was extensive throughout the following two centuries.
- Mutual aid societies provided insurance and burial benefits because commercial insurers would not serve black customers.
- Cooperative organisation was a response to exclusion from credit, insurance and markets rather than an ideological choice.
- Pooling resources allowed access to goods, credit and land that individuals were denied.
- Cooperatives faced sustained violence, credit denial and legal obstruction, which explains many failures better than the model does.
- W E B Du Bois advocated cooperative economics as a strategy and the debate over it ran through black political thought for decades.
- The historical record of this activity was largely absent from economic history until it was recovered from archives.
Who should read it
Readers interested in cooperative enterprise and in the economic history of communities excluded from conventional finance and markets.
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Where it sits in the reference 2
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