Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice

Abstract

The United Nations declared 2012 the International Year of Co-operatives because of the mighty contributions that co-operative enterprises have realised in terms of economic development and inclusive business models for marginalised groups. With Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, Jessica Gordon Nembard, an African American scholar, with deep roots in community economic development, has contributed a revisionist account of the social economy in the lives of Black people from the 1700s to 2007. Gordon Nembard’s work on co-operatives in the United States is situated within the global movement of co-operatives. She uses the International Co-operative Alliance (2012) definition of co-operatives as “an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise” (p2). From this, she argues that the Black experience in co-operatives in the Americas is rich and vibrant and is one of activism and is rooted in a cultural struggle for human rights. Even so, the social economy literature, by and large, has tended to be written in a generic way to theorise about economics, class and exclusion. It is important, then, to focus on the social economy and its development on specific racialised groups and this is one of the first social economy books to examine co-operative economic and thoughts from a Black perspective. In doing this, this book refutes a European starting point for co-operative development by showing shows that Black people in the Americas were active in co-operative businesses and organisations since slave times of the 1700s if not earlier. Indeed, in the Caribbean, the Bossales (African-born slaves) in Santo Domingue (called Haiti today) were engaging in Sol (collective informal banks) as far back as the 1600s (Heinl and Heinl 2005). Rather than Black people’s idea of mutual aid and collective activities being introduced by foreigners they were instead indigenous projects and to hold that collective organising was occuring outside of the dominant white power structure is a profound finding. Gordon Nembhard’s book has been ten-years in the making as existing literature was often not available or easily located. She refers to as the ‘hidden’ past of Black co-operatives in the Americas as stories of Black co-operatives are missing from history books, and this may explain why people are not aware of the rich tradition of collectivity among persons of African descent. The trained economist had to become a historian of sorts to dig for deeply buried information and to track down obscure periodicals such as Negro World, Pittsburgh Courier, or Crisis to log the countless one-liners dealing with co-operatives in diaries and letters. Some of the most minute details are found in her endnotes. In what seems painstaking archival work and many hours of listening to oral histories, Gordon Nembhard manages to bring to life material about cooperatives among African Americans starting and the time-line at the back of the book helps to orient the various cooperatives events in American history from a Black perspective. Gordon Nembhard’s work is a testimony of personal dedication and persistance. She