Collective Courage by Jessica Gordon Nembhard

Author:Jessica Gordon Nembhard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: 2014-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

8

BLACK RURAL COOPERATIVE ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY TO MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY

In 1969 Hamer laid the groundwork for an elaborate project to make poor folks economically self-sufficient. That project became the Freedom Farm Corporation. Through her work with the farm, Hamer broadened the meaning of civil rights activism to include addressing the economic needs of Black poor folks. . . . She was obsessed with ending human suffering around her, and this included suffering caused by decades of racism and poverty.

—LEE (2000, 147)

Co-ops are the best people development institutions you can have. . . . I have always been interested in rural development in the South. It’s not well understood outside of the South that there’s a connection between economic independence and political independence—that people didn’t have economic independence if when they voted they lost their jobs or got kicked off the plantation. The whole reason for forming cooperatives is to give people economic independence so that they could have independence in political and other matters.

—RAY MARSHALL (QUOTED IN FSC/LAF 1992, 25)

Black rural cooperative development in the early twentieth century continued the efforts of the nineteenth century. According to Curl (1980), during the Depression many small farmers, particularly Farmers’ Union members, turned to radical action. Frazier (1923) reports on cooperative marketing among Black farmers, particularly peanut growers in Texas. The activities of the National Federation of Colored Farmers, Inc. are chronicled in this chapter. In addition, cooperative activity took place in North Carolina in the 1930s and ’40s, anchored by the Bricks Rural Life School and Tyrrell County Training School. These schools promoted cooperative economics education and co-op development, and together organized the Eastern Carolina Council, a federation of North Carolinian cooperatives. More recently, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the only existing organization of African American cooperatives, was founded in 1967 (see chapter 9). I end this chapter with a discussion of the philosophy and efforts of Fannie Lou Hamer, the founder of Freedom Farm Corporation, and Freedom Farm’s accomplishments.

Highlights of Rural Cooperative Activity in the Early Twentieth Century

African American rural cooperative development in the early twentieth century continued to be a struggle, yet had some successes. In 1923, E. Franklin Frazier expressed a relatively common sentiment among African Americans exposed to cooperatives: that cooperatives were a step toward economic emancipation—especially in small rural communities where Blacks had no choice but to use the White landlord’s commissary (1923, 228). Frazier suggested that marketing cooperatives could be successful, especially if resources were combined and business conducted in cash. He also suggested that credit unions (cooperative banks) were a better alternative than the farm loan banks that discriminated against Black farmers.1 The National Negro Business League similarly noted in a weekly news summary in a July 1929 issue of the Negro World that Black farmers would not share in the $500 million revolving fund recently approved by Congress. The NNBL attributed this exclusion of Black farmers to the lack of Black cooperative agricultural organizations (according to “a Negro statistician at the Census Bureau”) and

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