The cover of Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s book, “Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice” against a red background.

Truth to Power is a regular series of conversations with writers about the promises and pitfalls of movements for social justice. From the roots of racial capitalism to the psychic toll of poverty, from resource wars to popular uprisings, the interviews in this column focus on how to write about the myriad causes of oppression and the organized desire for a better world.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Steve Dubb: This fall, Collective Courage turns 10 and is being re-released with a new preface, but I want to ask about the original book. Could you talk about what led you to write Collective Courage?

Jessica Gordon Nembhard: In the late 1990s, I got very interested in cooperative business development as a community economic development strategy, especially for subaltern populations like African Americans. So, I started learning as much as I could about co-ops and going to actual co-op conferences, and eventually also did some training programs. But I noticed none of the materials talked about African Americans. When I asked, no one could tell me about African American co-ops, though eventually, I finally learned about the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

I’m a researcher. This is an issue that needs research. So, I started asking…people who I thought might know something. I luckily had a classmate in graduate school, Curtis Haynes, who had done his dissertation on [W. E. B.] Du Bois’s economic thought, which is mostly cooperative economics. I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I’ve gotten if Curtis hadn’t said: “Read this, read this, go from there.”

So, that’s what I did. I read Du Bois….He was editor of The Crisis magazine for 35 years. I asked a research assistant to search through The Crisis magazine for all its references to co-ops. He came up with about seven articles. Du Bois also wrote two books that were largely about co-ops. One was about Black businesses from 1899, and the other was about economic cooperation from 1907.

That also gave me a whole lot more ideas and information. Every time I found one scholar or Black leader talking about co-ops, I found one or two other co-ops. And every time I found one or two other co-ops, I found more stuff about the US Black co-op movement. And then it kept moving. And I was able to do both a chronology and a thematic analysis.

SD: You talk about historical waves of Black co-op development in the United States. When were these, and how do they differ from each other?

JGN: I was able to pinpoint three periods of prolific African American co-op development: The 1880s, the 1930s–1940s, and [the] 1960s–1970s.

For the Black community, similar things were happening in those three periods. The first thing was that all three of those periods had Black organizations that were interested and promoting cooperative economics for Black folks, and often were helping to develop co-ops. For instance, the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance in the 1880s today is still considered the largest organization in Black history. And to think it wasn’t just the Populist Party or a farmers’ organization but it was a union and a co-op organization…is still fascinating. It also exemplified what was happening in the 1880s—all those fledgling movements were interconnected.

It is kind of a two-way street. We need co-ops to do the political activity, but we also need the economic activity to make the political activity meaningful.

So, it was a very interesting time, and Black folk were right in the middle of all that, both being involved in the integrated unions but also creating their own segregated, separate unions and organizations promoting co-op development. They also—before credit unions started—created credit exchanges. It was a way that people could pool money in order to get access to credit and buy the land or buy the factory, whatever they needed to pursue their co-op commonwealth notion that they [had] in the 1880s.

The 1930s and 1940s were similar….there was an economic crisis that was even worse than in the 1880s. There was also this connection again back to the progressive movement, as the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was becoming more and more interventionist and progressive. Even the federal government [was] pushing what they called self-help co-ops.

There are also again some Black organizations promoting cooperatives, such as the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Their Ladies’ Auxiliary is teaching about co-ops and doing co-op study groups and starting co-ops, with Black labor members and their families. And Black colleges actually have some courses in co-op development along with consumer economics—and helping surrounding communities to develop some co-ops.

Then you get to the 1960s and the 1970s—the economy in the sixties isn’t so bad. But now you have strong Black organizations arguing for liberation, civil rights, economic rights. The push for cooperative development is connected to this movement for civil rights, political rights, racial justice.

It is kind of a two-way street. We need co-ops to do the political activity, but we also need the economic activity to make the political activity meaningful.

There are a lot of interesting groups [during that time]: the Black Panthers, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives starts in the late sixties. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is also promoting co-ops. Mostly they are doing it quietly though, because at this point you have the Red Scare from the fifties.

People [in power] are calling co-ops communist. So, co-op members are not always calling what they are doing co-ops. They are doing more collective stuff. Or they are doing stuff under the radar. You still see a strong role of the co-op movement involved with all these progressive movements.

The Black co-op movement was really a partner in the long civil rights movement.

For instance, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which is a regional co-op development organization, started at a meeting that was called by all the major Black civil rights organizations with money from the federal government and foundation money to come together to figure out how they could support economic justice better and keep people on the farms. They realized that they needed a Black regional co-op development organization to do that.

The NAACP and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and the National Urban League—when you read about them, they don’t say they were involved in that, but they all had members going to that first meeting that said, “Yes, we need a regional co-op development organization in the South” because that will support Southern economic development better or keep people on the farms. It will make life more viable.

SD: Back in the early 2010s, much of this history was buried. You had to reconstruct it. Can you talk about the process and why we didn’t know the civil rights movement was also a co-op movement?

JGN: The Black co-op movement was really a partner in the long civil rights movement. So, not even the civil rights movement that we think of that started in the 1940s or 1950s, but all the civil rights activity that was happening in the 1800s, early 1900s, all the liberation movements, human rights kind of movements. We always had either Black organizations overtly talking about co-op development or quietly doing it.

As for why it was so hard to find this information, I think a couple of things were happening. One, it was quite dangerous to be involved in a co-op, especially for Black folks, because our White supremacist country didn’t really want Black self-sufficiency.

When Black farmers would come together to either buy a farm or do farm marketing or a farm supply co-op or a credit exchange, they were suddenly opting out of the White capitalist economy. And that meant the capitalists were losing customers and control over land. It was dangerous.

And I write about a range of sabotage from simple things like financial sabotage—banks colluding to not give loans or lines of credit to Black co-ops, or railroad companies and trucking companies refusing to transport their goods. And worse things like getting in the way of them buying the property, poisoning the wells on their land, or discrediting and lynching their leaders, burning down co-op buildings, making the White co-ops refuse to work with or serve the Black co-op groups. All that range of sabotage happened even way back in the 1800s.

In a lot of cases, I noticed that Black folks stopped calling what they were doing a co-op. So, when I started talking about this history, when I was with Black audiences, I would have people come to me afterwards and tell me, “Oh, now that you’re explaining this, I realize my grandparents, my aunt, and uncle were actually involved in a co-op, a store they all worked in and co-owned.” It was really a co-op, but they didn’t call it a co-op. They didn’t want it to get shut down or burned down or sabotaged again.

Pretty much 99 percent of [co-ops] started with a study group.

I also realized, the more I read and interviewed people, that Black folks were often gun-shy. If they started a co-op and they went under, they would blame themselves, as opposed to naming the structural reasons and White supremacist reasons. There was a level of shame.

I think that’s why most of the time this stuff stayed under the radar. The lucky thing is I was still able to find the information. It was just hard. It took me almost 15 years—10 years to get enough information to think about a book and another five years to pull it all together.

I was originally hoping to find every single co-op that had [existed] across the United States and have a directory. I realized quickly that that was not going to happen. So, then I was like, okay, do I have enough examples? Do I have enough different kinds, so I could connect them to the different themes, such as Black liberation, women’s roles?

SD: Could you discuss some of the themes that you focused on?

JGN: One is the role of education. I was shocked when I realized most of the co-ops that I knew how they started, pretty much 99 percent of them started with a study group.

It makes sense. These are the ways you learn. Some study groups started out studying a problem. For example, we have an economic problem. Either we are discriminated against, or the economy is so horrible that we can’t make a living. That kind of thing.

In studying their situation, somehow somebody would mention that maybe we should start a co-op or maybe there is a structure that would work better for what our conditions are. And luckily there were materials. The United States had CLUSA (which is now NCBA CLUSA: National Cooperative Business Association Cooperative League of the USA).

CLUSA started in the early 1900s and started putting out materials. I have brochures and memos from some organizations, like the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, telling their members to read CLUSA materials.

Halena Wilson, the president of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, wrote columns in Black Worker magazine—which was the Brotherhood’s magazine—about cooperatives. So, she taught people through her columns. She also started about 17 study groups among the women of the various chapters as a way to share information.

A lot of the study groups continued even after [the co-ops] started. Some of them continued as women’s guilds, some as continuous education. But behind them all was the recognition that the learning together and learning about things they weren’t going to learn anywhere else was very important.

I can’t understate this: Learning together has been invaluable in all these examples—and continues to be. Today, there are tons of study groups, book clubs, a lot of them starting with Collective Courage. So many people are reading the book and even calling their study groups Collective Courage book groups. People are finding that strategy still to be very useful.

Another theme is the strong role Black women played. I shouldn’t have been surprised because Black women kept the civil rights movement going. It also happens in a lot of Black churches—the men are the leaders, and the women do the work.

It was surprising because in mainstream co-op literature about the role of women—European women, Canadian women, Japanese women—all were complaining that women didn’t have leadership roles.

But when I looked at Black co-ops, many were started by women and run by women. It was interesting to see that far beyond what was happening in other co-ops, Black women were not just doing the scud work, but were leaders, creators, and educators. So that’s very exciting—to show that co-ops, at least Black co-ops, really did live their economic democracy practices and goals in relation to gender.

SD: Can you discuss some of these Black women co-op leaders?

JGN: One is Ella Jo Baker, who is much better known for civil rights movement work, especially as an advisor to SNCC. People don’t know she also was a cofounder of SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and was their executive director, because people only think of Martin Luther King.

In the 1930s, right out of college, she moved to Harlem. She met George Schuyler, who was a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, but also lived in Harlem. He got excited about cooperatives and put out a call to young Blacks to embrace cooperativism and to start learning about co-ops and creating co-ops—and show the “old fogies” that young people had a new strategy to achieve racial justice.

He and Ella Baker decided to start the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League. She was the executive director, and he was the president. I was able to find in her papers at the Schomburg Center in Harlem four years of correspondence, newsletters, manifests about her leadership in the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League.

She gave a keynote speech, which, alas, I could not find a copy of, about the role of Black women in the co-op movement. She gave it at their first annual conference in Pittsburgh in 1931. That conference is amazing because, remember, 1931 is at the height of the Great Depression—600 Black people, at a time when it was hard to get the train or bus money, went to Pittsburgh to meet about why young people should become co-op developers and should start co-ops in Black communities.

She also had newsletters where she gave tips on how to start co-ops. The group had a huge vision. Baker traveled all around every chapter (there were at least 15) every year—giving pep talks, raising money. She hoped they would get 5,000 members, and if everybody paid one dollar each, they would have $5,000 to do cooperative development, a lot of money in 1931. They didn’t get that far. I think they got to 400 members at the most. But still most of their chapters started at least one co-op or credit union.

Another women leader was Halena Wilson, who, as I mentioned above, led the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The Ladies’ Auxiliary were the wives and the maids of the porters who were in the union.

But the Ladies’ Auxiliary was very active and well respected. [Labor organizer] A. Philip Randolph wrote letters regularly to Wilson. Wilson started her career—she was never paid for any of this work—running a mutual aid society. So, that’s one reason I write about mutual aid, because people get training in pooling resources and making financial decisions together in mutual aid and then they can do it in more formal co-ops.

Wilson already had this notion of what pooling resources and making decisions together could do. And then for about 30 years, she was an elected president of the Ladies’ Auxiliary; they kept reelecting her. She was combining this notion that it is not good enough to have good wages if you weren’t doing something to keep that money recirculating in the Black community. For her, consumer rights and co-op rights all came together.

We are now in the fourth wave of Black co-op development in the 2020s.

A third woman I will mention is Fannie Lou Hamer from the 1970s Freedom Farm Co-op. Fannie Lou Harmer started out in SNCC. She was beaten severely for registering people to vote. She and her husband were evicted from their farm as sharecroppers because they registered to vote.

She understood that you can’t fight for civil and political rights if you don’t have economic rights, if you don’t have control over your own economic wellbeing. She talked about how if we don’t own our own land and create our own food, we will never be able to fight for our political rights because they use food as a weapon, and poverty keeps us from having the strength and stability to be in the political fight.

So, she started the co-op. She was able to raise money to get land. She had people farming together. She also had affordable housing, co-op childcare programs. Some of the early Head Start programs were families on Freedom Farm.

One last woman co-op leader I’ll mention is Nannie Helen Burroughs. She’s also well-known for other things. She started a women’s and girls’ school in 1909. She started the Women’s Baptist Convention. She was a women’s rights advocate.

But in the 1930s, she also started a women’s cooperative for unemployed and destitute women and housewives. She was one of the early ones to do women’s producer co-ops, getting women to do sewing, canning, making chairs. Her idea was that women needed jobs that were safer and more secure than domestic service. She wanted jobs that women could control, so she used the worker co-op model.

Later, she joined with another woman to form Cooperative Industries of [Washington] DC. It was first called Northeast Self-Help Co-op. She also decided that Black folks should get some of FDR’s co-op money. So, for three years in a row, she applied for funding under FDR’s self-help co-op initiative; she finally got a $20,000 grant in the third year, which enabled her to buy a farm. Ultimately, they had a co-op farm, a farm produce store, and a grocery store in addition to the worker co-ops. So, she was combining women’s rights with economic and civil rights.

SD: In your new preface, you write about how today there’s a fourth wave of Black co-ops. What do you see as the current trends in this wave?

JGN: In writing the new preface, I got very excited…about the 2020s. I am saying that we are now in the fourth wave of Black co-op development in the 2020s for a couple of reasons. I think between the Occupy movement that young people were doing, where they also tried to do more co-op development, and the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, where people were realizing how precarious the housing market was and doing more sharing of housing and things like that—there is a recognition of the need for survival and that pooling resources and working together in co-ops and solidarity economics was going to make a difference.

By the time you get to COVID, we have more and more people realizing that working for other people was not that safe or satisfying. Their jobs were called essential, but they are doing all the worst jobs, the most dangerous jobs, and were the most exposed to COVID. This led a lot of people to say, “I don’t need this.”

Rather than being an alternative, cooperation was actually the first economic system of human beings.

We also got George Floyd and the resurfacing of the Black Lives Matter movement, so again the Black power, the Black self-determination idea is connecting with this economic analysis.

And so, we have people again who are saying, “The smarter thing for me and my family is to opt out of the mainstream economy and create with other people in my neighborhood to solve our own problems together in this democratic collective way.

There has been huge growth in worker co-ops and significant growth in Black food co-ops. Much more emphasis on Black food security and addressing that through anti-food-apartheid and connecting back to co-op urban farms and food co-ops to address food sovereignty.

We are seeing a lot of that happening in the Black community, a lot of growth there and a lot of leadership being developed. So, people aren’t in isolation doing this. Among the Black food co-ops, they all know each other, share ideas, and meet during conferences. More Black co-ops are showing up at co-op conferences. The US Federation of Worker Cooperatives’ board is now majority people of color.

SD: In the preface, you mention that “cooperative economics came first” (before capitalism) and argue that cooperative economics or solidarity economics should not be considered “alternative economics.” Can you elaborate on that?

JGN: In the original book, I write about alternative economics and choosing alternatives. But in the 10 years since the book was published, the more I have been learning about worker co-ops, and co-ops with incarcerated people, and what is happening worldwide, it is very clear to me that rather than being an alternative, cooperation was actually the first economic system of human beings.

If you go back to hunters and gatherers, that was an economic cooperative system. They didn’t formally incorporate under the International Cooperative Alliance’s seven principles, but they were doing cooperative shared economy. It took several of you to hunt and take down a deer or a buffalo. You shared it with your entire community—at least with your clan. Farming: same thing. People farmed, everybody participated, and everybody got their share.

When you think about it, the system we are in now, capitalism, our global system, is at most 400 years old. It’s a new system. It is an all-consuming system. It’s made us forget. It’s very oppressive, so it’s also a traumatizing system.

We don’t really learn about any other system. We think capitalism is the only one. The propaganda about capitalism is that it’s the best system, but that’s disputable, especially for the people who are most exploited and impacted. It is not necessarily the best system for the 99 percent.

Now, I have started using the language of co-ops as the first system, and we’re going back to that system or renewing a system of cooperation and solidarity economics.

It’s the way human beings do economics, and we should be doing it more. I also talk to people about recognizing that we do daily acts of economic solidarity.

It’s not just a humane way to do economics, but there are things that we do every day that are part of the cooperative economy. We barter; we share things; a lot of Black groups still do susus and pool resources in other ways.

It is capitalism that we should understand as alien to us. To me, it helps us to think that solidarity is really an everyday thing. And we can just augment, supplement, do more and more of it. And connect more to the collective solidarity way of human beings and feel comfortable that this is the right way.

The other thing I think I mentioned in the new preface is that with the environmental crisis we are in, we are struggling to keep our planet livable. Cooperatives are also a solution to that. Most of the time before capitalism most of humanity was doing sustainable economics and, in some ways, protecting Mother Earth.

It was only this drive for profits in capitalism that we see not just human beings, but the earth and land as disposable. So, co-ops can help us with the crises of racial injustice, economic justice, the environment. Co-ops help us address all of those issues in one structure.

SD: At the end of the preface, you discuss the need to create a strong theory of Black cooperative economics. What would a strong theory of Black cooperative economics look like?

JGN: My dad is 103. When he read the preface, he was upset. He said, “I think you’re undermining yourself. Didn’t you just give us a whole strong theory of Black cooperative economics? And now you’re saying we need one?” And I was like: “It’s too late. It’s gone to press.”

I guess what I mean is what I have done is start to articulate the elements and analyze the Black co-op movement and the worker co-op movement in general. It is not just values and principles of cooperation. It is not just the way I have tried to add the values and principles of solidarity economics. But this notion for subaltern groups, especially Black Americans—of how to conceptualize and then engage in and practice an economics that does connect back to our humanity. And then how do you explain it?

Neoclassical economics can’t really explain this notion of economics as solving problems and giving back to community. Economics should be in service to humanity—economics for the public good, for the good of all.

Even political economy doesn’t quite get at it because it is more focused on critique. I am interested in understanding how people work together not just to help themselves but help others—how we work together to solve problems in ways that engage, empower, and create more connections and relationships with people.

I don’t feel like in economics that we have good terminology or thought-out theories for that—yet.

I once gave a talk on: “Is there a grounded theory of Black economic development?” If we’re thinking about grounded theory as theories that come out of what’s already happening and how people are already operating, I think that’s what I have started to do.

SD: Is there anything else that you would like to add?

JGN: I am trying to learn more about Indigenous knowledge. I was very excited to learn about the circle of courage and this notion that the highest form of courage is generosity.

When I read that, I felt I had to write about it. The whole notion of collective courage is about people coming together—not just having the courage to do something different but also the courage to do something that people don’t want you to do, against all the sabotage.

But also, when I read that the highest form of courage is generosity, I felt that connects back to collective courage and solidarity economy. And how important it is to counteract this notion that we do economics for our private gain, so we can connect around economic issues in a way that is really for the common good and raise all of us up.