Recovering the History of African American Cooperative Economics

Abstract

Jessica Gordon Nembhard has drilled deep into the recesses of the African American sociohistorical experience and unearthed the history of African American “cooperative economic thought and practice.” In doing so, she has expanded three fields of study: African American business or economic history, the history of African American social movements, and the history of cooperative economic ventures in the United States. Collective Courage, however, is more than a recovery project, though given the scarcity of detailed studies on the subject that in itself would be noteworthy. In addition to excavating and bringing together myriad fragments of the history of African American economic cooperation scattered across two centuries, Gordon Nembhard provides an outstanding example of interdisciplinary scholarship erected on a solid analytical foundation of mixed methods, written from an African American scholar-activist perspective. In this vein, Gordon Nembhard refers to her study as an attempt to construct “a theory and practice of economic development within a broad tradition of populism and economic justice” (19). In doing so, she offers a fascinating story about a suppressed element of the African American struggle, but one which comports with the broad outlines of the African American sociohistorical experience—a story of racial oppression and repression and of African Americans’ resistance through study, service, and struggle. Renowned scholars of black business enterprises, Juliet E. K. Walker and Robert E. Weems, have noted the neglect, underrepresentation, and bias against this aspect of African American community development. Yet, curiously, the school of pro-capitalist entrepreneurship has replicated a similar bias in their