Mutualism by Sara Horowitz

Author:Sara Horowitz [Horowitz, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Members of a society would put in a certain amount of money every month or year, and whenever a need came up—someone’s mother got sick, or someone was hurt and unable to work—that member would be able to take money out of the collective pot to defray the expense.

Over time, these early mutual aid societies became more sophisticated and grew into Black schools, insurance companies, credit associations and banks, and other cooperative organizations. There was a Black cooperative shipyard, the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company, in Baltimore. There were Black cooperative associations of farmers in the freed South after the Civil War. In the early twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois saw the importance of cooperativism to the Black community, believing that cooperatives would, as Gordon Nembhard writes, “provide the economic opportunities denied to African Americans and would allow Blacks to serve the common good rather than be slaves to market forces.” Gordon Nembhard posits that Du Bois saw even the Underground Railroad as a kind of cooperative—an example, as she puts it, of “high-level social and economic cooperation and collaboration among African Americans and between Blacks and Whites.”

But Randolph recognized that in the industrial era, Black mutual aid wouldn’t be enough. Newly freed Blacks still faced enormous economic obstacles after the Civil War—and not just because of the rise of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South. By the late nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was transforming the way Americans worked and lived. Black workers needed more than Black religious organizations and mutual aid societies. They needed Black unions, too.

But they would have to wait. Randolph wouldn’t succeed in integrating the labor movement until 1934. And in the meantime, the labor movement was experiencing some growing pains of its own.

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