Let Justice Roll Down by John M. Perkins

Author:John M. Perkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gospel Light
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

Cooperatives Are the Key

As I said, I did a lot of thinking in the late ’60s. Sometimes I would think back to my childhood. And when I did, I saw my life pattern as a repeated theme—a fight to escape from an economic system that enslaves.

Even among evangelicals, I seemed to be seeing the same thing I had tried to escape from all my life. I began wondering then about matters that later led to things like co-ops for the powerless and penniless. And since my ideas about co-ops were rooted deep in my theology, they had entirely unique goals. They would be more than just an economic escape from the old plantation system whose ghost still haunted us.

So alongside the voter activities of the mid ’60s, I found another positive focus for activity: economic cooperatives. Several other organizers of the rural poor saw the co-op movement as providing a mechanism for self-development that would produce more than financial advances. It could provide activity and training for people used to having things done for them, and so start them out of this cycle of dependence.

One such worker was Father A.J. McKnight, a black Roman Catholic priest who eventually left his pulpit for full-time administration of economic activities. He had obtained a Ford Foundation grant to help form co-ops in the South. I went to hear McKnight speak, and knew right away that co-ops could answer some of the problems we faced in Simpson County.

So a couple of months later, in September 1967, I attended a workshop held in Abbeyville, Louisiana, sponsored by the Southern Educational Foundation, McKnight’s group. I listened and talked and thought. These were people with high economic motivation.

As a Christian, I felt I was catching on to a solution to a problem that we faced. Co-ops fit into my theological understanding. But I could see that the strain on my evangelical friends was going to be tough, because they didn’t have any framework to deal with economics from a Christian perspective.

Yet as I looked at my brothers and sisters at the conference, and knew the tension that economics would create, I wondered whether we who were there had the spiritual strength to meet the challenge. A spiritual lack was felt at the workshop, though they didn’t feel that Christianity—at least as they knew it—had any real answers. One resource person for the conference, who was a business consultant for Ebony magazine and a successful urban black, looked across the spectrum of new economic activities in the nation’s black communities, and admitted to me that unless there was “quick and fervent” spiritual activity in the black community, it could destroy itself with the new economic push. He agreed that the economic fabric—that is, the general attitudes such as the honesty of black folks—was no stronger than what the white structure had. And he, with the others at the workshop, saw the white economy as hypocritical and too often geared toward selfishness and monopoly. Was this what we were

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