Читать книгу Collective Courage - Jessica Gordon Nembhard - Страница 11
ОглавлениеEARLY BLACK ECONOMIC COOPERATION
Intentional Communities, Communes, and Mutual Aid
This tendency toward mutual helpfulness appeared even among the slaves. Wherever Negroes had their own churches benevolence developed as the handmaiden of religion. They looked out for the sick, provided them nourishment which the common fare of the plantation did not afford, and often nursed and treated such patients until they were reestablished in health. Free Negroes of the South were well known for their mutual helpfulness.
—WOODSON (1929, 202)
The history of community control in the United States has several different components, but in terms of providing the roots for the emergence of community ownership, the most important of these is the history of black “organized communities” of the nineteenth century.
—DEFILIPPIS (2004, 38)
The history of African American cooperative economic activity begins with solidarity and collective action (economic and social) in the face of oppression, racial violence, discrimination, and sometimes betrayal. Even though separated from their clans and nations in Africa, enslaved as well as the few free African Americans continued African practices during the antebellum period—cooperating economically to till small garden plots to provide more variety and a healthier diet for their families. For two centuries they did not earn a regular wage or even own their own bodies, but they often saved what money they could and pooled their savings to help buy their own and one another’s freedom (especially among family members and spouses) (Du Bois 1907; Douglass 1882). Free African Americans pooled their resources to purchase operating farms toward the end of and immediately after the Civil War, in order to own land and make a living (Du Bois 1907; Jones 1985). Freedmen and enslaved alike formed mutual-aid, burial, and beneficial societies, pooling their dues to take care of their sick, look after widows and children, and bury their dead. These mutual-aid societies were often organized and led by women (Jones 1985) and connected to religious institutions (Du Bois 1898, 1907; Weare 1993). Blacks often formed their own intentional communities to work together for mutual benefit. Some consisted of free Blacks, but many were organized by groups of fugitives from enslavement. Sometimes White benefactors created Black communities to paternalistically help African Americans learn how to be good citizens. Finally, some White intentional communities welcomed a few Blacks to integrate their communities. This chapter provides an overview of all these of precursors to formal cooperatives among African Americans.
Early African American cooperative economic action took many forms: mutual-aid and beneficial societies, mutual insurance organizations, fraternal organizations and secret societies, buying clubs, joint-stock ownership among African Americans, and collective farming. W. E. B. Du Bois, in Some Efforts of American Negroes for Their Own Social Betterment (1898) and Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans (1907), documents myriad examples of economic cooperation. In his early work on the subject at the turn of the century, Du Bois used the term “cooperative business” loosely, even though he was familiar with the growing cooperative economics movement in Europe and the United States and corresponded with its leaders. The president of the Co-operative League of America (CLUSA), J. P. Warbasse, wrote an article in Du Bois’s Crisis magazine in 1918. Du Bois’s correspondence with Warbasse (DuBois 1925; Warbasse 1925) also indicates that Du Bois knew about the Co-operative League of America,1 and therefore eventually understood the formal definition of a cooperative business. CLUSA did not, however, form until 1916, so that in 1898 and 1907, when Du Bois first wrote about cooperative efforts among Blacks, it is conceivable that formal, well-developed definitions of cooperative economics and cooperative businesses had not yet become standard in the United States. On the other hand, Du Bois studied in Europe in the 1890s, and the International Co-operative Alliance was established there in 1895, so he may have had some familiarity with the formal definition of cooperative businesses that was developing during that time. That said, his intention in these early studies appears to be to document the variety of ways in which African Americans shared the costs, risks, and benefits of economic activity that helped Black families and communities, and to illustrate joint Black business and economic successes. Later in his career, Du Bois proposed Rochdale cooperative organizations as an important economic strategy for African Americans, and in 1918 he organized the Negro Cooperative Guild (see chapter 4) to promote Black cooperative economic development.
Collective Resistance
Africans in the Americas and African Americans have showed throughout history their willingness and ability to organize themselves in order to survive enslavement and poverty. They have organized myriad strategies of emancipation, including buying their freedom, work slowdowns, the creation of escape paths, and the formation of separate communities. Du Bois (1898) notes the importance of collective resistance and organization for resistance and escape. The Underground Railroad was also a type of economic and social cooperation. The Underground Railroad has been much described and researched, so I will only mention here that Du Bois and others wrote about the ways in which the design and implementation of escape routes throughout the United States and into Canada were examples of high-level social and economic cooperation and collaboration among African Americans and between Blacks and Whites. The Underground Railroad system also linked independent Black communities to one another and connected fugitives from slavery to Black and White support systems.
Curl similarly notes the ways in which mutual aid and cooperation for survival “both among slaves and among servants were almost universal”(1980, 4). While their cooperative networks were mostly invisible to masters, African Americans used them as channels for organized resistance. In addition, the communal settlements and villages organized by fugitives from enslavement were used “as bases for guerrilla raids on the slavers. These ‘maroon’ outlaw communes, many with both Black and Indian members, appeared wherever slavery spread” (Curl 1980, 4). Like Du Bois, Curl notes that religious gatherings were also mutual-aid gatherings and often served as planning meetings for revolts and escapes. For Du Bois, religious camaraderie was the basis for African American economic cooperation, and churches, secret societies, and mutual-aid societies among enslaved and free alike created the beginnings of economic cooperation. In terms of official organization, mutual-aid societies actually predate independent African American churches (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010), but not Black religious activity. However, more important than what came first are the many ways in which African Americans used cooperation to survive enslavement, gain freedom, and advance economically.
Black Communities or Communes and Utopian Ideals
Runaways from enslavement formed their own communities where they eluded or fought off bounty hunters, took on the identity of Maroons, and lived collective existences in relative isolation. Du Bois notes that the African American “spirit of revolt” used cooperation in the form of insurrection to establish “widespread organization for the rescue of fugitive slaves.” This in turn developed, in both the North and the South, into “various co-operative efforts toward economic emancipation and land buying,” and those efforts led to cooperative businesses, building-and-loan associations, and trade unions (1907, 26).
In addition, abolitionists and abolitionist societies deliberately established Negro-organized communities and communes to house freed African Americans and to teach them how to live as free people, earn a living and an education, and run their own communities. They raised money and often managed these communal farms. These communities created spaces of isolation and independence from racism, used mutual aid and assistance, and pooled Black and White resources until African Americans could manage on their own. While not exactly centers of Black self-help (because African Americans were so dependent on White benefactors), they are early examples of African American communalism. Such communities were scattered throughout the American Midwest—in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin—and southern Ontario, Canada (DeFilippis 2004, 38; Pease and Pease 1963). The first communities were recorded in 1830 and were gone by the end of the Civil War, with emancipation. Weare (1993) notes that Negro-led societies were organized only after White groups refused to allow Black leaders to join them.
While most of the successful communes were located in Canada, some took root in the United States. The Wilberforce Colony in Ontario was nearly self-sustaining in 1831. Black inhabitants owned their own sawmill and one hundred head of cattle, as well as pigs and horses. They had a system of schools for their children that were so successful that neighboring Whites sent their own children there (Pease and Pease 1963, 50). However, the families remained poor, their homes were tiny and not well kept up, and they spent time and money on “endless controversies and lawsuits with their U.S. agent” (51). The Dawn Settlement near Dresden, Ontario, another Black community, developed around the British-American Institute. Josiah Henson, a fugitive from enslavement in the United States, was one of the founders and an early leader. Founded in 1837, the first tract of land, of two hundred acres, was bought in 1841 (64). In December 1842 the manual-labor school opened. The community developed to serve the school and operated “formally, and informally, as a co-operative unit in maintaining it” (65). By the early 1850s roughly five hundred African Americans/Canadians owned about fifteen hundred acres, separate from the three hundred acres belonging to the institute. Inhabitants raised corn, wheat, oats, and tobacco, and operated a sawmill, a gristmill, a rope factory, and a brickyard.
The Northampton Association of Education and Industry
The Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI) was a utopian community and short-lived integrated commune in western Massachusetts. Among its inhabitants were Sojourner Truth, a washerwoman, formerly enslaved, who became an outspoken abolitionist and feminist, famous for her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, and David Ruggles, an African American printer and leader of the Underground Railroad, and an advocate of hydrotherapy (by 1845 he had established a water-cure hospital in the area, one of the first in the country). The NAEI was established in 1842 in the town of Florence (outside Northampton) as an intentional utopian community by abolitionists and social reformers (Historic Northampton n.d.). They established a community around a communally owned and operated silk mill. Milling of silk was chosen in part because the “equal and classless” silkworm is a symbol of democracy. The NAEI was a predominantly White organization that believed in the possibility of a socially, politically, and economically egalitarian society. It operated as an economic commune, and education was an integral component of the collective’s aim to create a democratic and socially responsible society. The founders felt that everyone could do any job and encouraged members to learn silk milling, housekeeping, and social justice work “by doing”—by engaging in the work together, fostering active participation by all, and creating an egalitarian work environment. Members worked and studied together six days a week. On Sunday morning they worshipped, and Sunday afternoons were set aside for free discussions and debates about world issues as well as commune policies (Collaborative for Educational Services 2009b).
Three or four African Americans were associated with the NAEI. The abolitionists Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and David Ruggles were active participants and the most famous of the NAEI’s Black members. The association accepted (harbored) fugitives from enslavement as part of its abolitionist and social justice mission (Collaborative for Educational Services 2009a).
Frederick Douglass was a fugitive from enslavement, an abolitionist, a newspaper editor, and a shipbuilder by trade who became an advisor to presidents and the first African American recorder of deeds in the District of Columbia after the Civil War. Although Douglass started his association with the NAEI at its beginnings in 1842, and would stop there on his way to giving abolitionist lectures in New England, he never lived there. Douglass visited several times, engaged in debates there, and gave speeches at the commune. He wrote about his experience with the NAEI in 1895, noting that its goals were to “change and improve conditions of human existence; to liberate mankind from the bondage of time-worn custom; to curb and fix limits to individual selfishness; to diffuse wealth among the lowly; to banish poverty; to harmonize conflicting interests, and to promote the happiness of mankind generally” (1895, 129). Douglass was struck by the sense of liberty and equality he felt among the group: “The place and the people struck me as the most democratic I had ever met. It was a place to extinguish all aristocratic pretensions. There was no high, no low, no masters, no servants, no white, and no black. I, however, felt myself in very high society” (130). The NAEI was the only place Douglass had ever been in the United States where he felt that his color was not used against him. “My impressions of the Community,” he wrote, “are not only the impressions of a stranger, but those of a fugitive slave to whom at that time even Massachusetts opposed a harsh and repellant side. The cordial reception I met with at Florence, was, therefore, much enhanced by its contrast with many other places in that commonwealth. Here, at least, neither my color nor my condition was counted against me” (130). Douglass also mentioned meeting David Ruggles and Sojourner Truth there, and noted how well the community treated and protected them.
Sojourner Truth joined the NAEI in 1843 and lived there for about two years. It was there that she met William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass, and Wendell Phillips, and afterward became an abolitionist and women’s rights activist and speaker. The commune elected Truth head of laundry, where she supervised White members of the collective, an unheard-of arrangement at the time (Collaborative for Educational Services 2009b). Truth recalled that the NAEI, more than anywhere else she had ever lived, provided “equality of feeling,” “liberty of thought and speech,” and “largeness of soul” (Historic Northampton n.d.), in spite of difficult living conditions. Truth described her first thoughts about the NAEI:
She did not fall in love at first sight with the Northampton Association, for she arrived there at a time when appearances did not correspond with the ideas of associationists, as they had been spread out in their writings; for their phalanx was a factory, and they were wanting in means to carry out their ideas of beauty and elegance, as they would have done in different circumstances. But she thought she would make an effort to tarry with them one night, though that seemed to her no desirable affair. But as soon as she saw that accomplished, literary and refined persons were living in that plain and simple manner, and submitting to the labors and privations incident to such an infant institution, she said, “Well, if these can live here, I can.” Afterwards, she gradually became pleased with, and attached to, the place and the people, as well she might; for it must have been no small thing to have found a home in a “Community composed of some of the choicest spirits of the age,” where all was characterised by an equality of feeling, a liberty of thought and speech, and a largeness of soul, she could not have before met with, to the same extent, in any of her wanderings. (Truth 1850, “Another Camp Meeting”)
The commune did not last, and Truth’s feelings of contentment and security there wore off as well.
When we first saw her, she was working with a hearty good will; saying she would not be induced to take regular wages, believing, as once before, that now Providence had provided her with a never-failing fount, from which her every want might be perpetually supplied through her mortal life. In this, she had calculated too fast. For the Associationists found, that, taking every thing into consideration, they would find it most expedient to act individually; and again, the subject of this sketch found her dreams unreal, and herself flung back upon her own resources for the supply of her needs. (Ibid.)
Over its four and a half years of existence, more than two hundred people joined the commune. Largely because they could not operate the silk mill at a profit, the community disbanded in 1846 (Collaborative for Educational Services 2009c). According to Truth and her biographer, however, the NAEI also failed because individualism corrupted the communal spirit. All members, including the African American members, moved on, but they recalled the experiment fondly, though also with disappointment.
Black communes or independent communities, such as Nashoba Commune in Tennessee and the Combahee River Colony of Black women in South Carolina, experienced both success and failure.
The Nashoba Commune
The Nashoba Commune was planned as an organized Negro community that practiced communitarianism in Tennessee in 1825. Founder Frances Wright, an early women’s suffragist and an admirer of New Harmony, the Owenite utopian community in Indiana, planned to buy fifty to a hundred enslaved African Americans, set them up in a community, divide their time between manual work and academic study, train them for freedom, and provide for their colonization outside the United States (Pease and Pease 1963; Curl 1980).2 All African American members were responsible for paying their own way, purchasing their own freedom, and paying the cost of eventual colonization. Slave owners were to be compensated, and the money invested in the community was to be paid back. According to Curl, “While Owen’s concept strove toward the liberation of all people from wage-slavery, Wright tried to apply the concept to chattel-slavery. She considered it one last hope for the liberation of black people short of violent insurrection” (1980, 11).
Wright bought three hundred acres near Memphis. Once established, the Nashoba Commune actually became an interracial community of free persons—enslaved people were no longer invited to join unless they were original inhabitants and their masters moved with them. Sometimes called a cooperative and sometimes a commune, the community struggled socially and politically for three years. African Americans were not allowed to hold leadership positions. Local racists also harassed the community (Curl 1980, 11). In 1828, when Wright returned from convalescence in Europe, the community was suffering from the national economic depression, as well as mismanagement. In 1829 Nashoba members could not pay their mortgages and disbanded. Wright sent the original African American inhabitants whom she was responsible for, including the enslaved members whom she still owned, to freedom in Haiti (Pease and Pease 1963, 36–37). According to Curl, Wright then became active in the New York Workingmen’s Party, “giving up the socialist community strategy as impracticable at the time” (1980, 11).
The Combahee River Colony
The Combahee River Colony had a much different beginning and purpose. The colony was located in a remote area where African Americans established their own settlements and remained relatively self-sufficient and semiautonomous: the Gullah/Geechee communities in the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands. The Combahee River Colony in South Carolina consisted of several hundred African American women during the Civil War whose men had gone to join the Union Army. They occupied abandoned farmland where they “grew crops and cared for one another” (Jones 1985, 52). They refused to work for Whites and were proud of their handicrafts and cotton crop, as well as their independence. The community became relatively well known as an example of Black women’s independence, perseverance, and collective spirit.
Fit to Be Free
Pease and Pease describe these “organized Negro communities”—“designed to prove that the Negro was fit to be a free man”—as “impressive undertakings,” both in the goals set and “in the dedication, zeal, and vision of those who devoted themselves to” them (1963, 160). They were political and economic havens for escaped enslaved people and impoverished freedmen, operating under ideals of Jeffersonian agrarianism and, later, urban-industrial entrepreneurship. These communities provided academic and vocational education, as well as citizenship and political training for moral and spiritual improvement and leadership development. Although collective in practice, the ideals promoted most by the White organizers (and many of the Black leaders) were the ultimate achievement of middle-class culture, individualism, and capitalist development. Individuals and their families did benefit. During the time they lived there, and while the communities were successful, members were able to make a living collectively, to provide themselves and their children with a good education and other training, and often to own their own land. While the examples show that there were benefits from and positive aspects of these communities, they were also based largely on paternalistic relationships between White benefactor-managers and Black residents. These communities suffered many hardships, missteps, frauds, and failures. Pease and Pease observe that “often settlements looked less like co-operative community enterprises than like isolated reservations” (1963, 162). The goal was to create gentleman farmers out of ex-enslaved people, to have them work the soil to improve their character. Most of these communities succeeded in training Blacks to adjust to and integrate into White society, but not in changing White attitudes, making systemic changes, or even operating in separate utopian societies. The Combahee River Colony stands out as one of the few that had genuine strong African American leadership and were largely autonomous of White oversight. Pease and Pease conclude pessimistically that “the results were, on the whole, . . . tragically inconsequential” (160).
Nevertheless, these experiments in communal living provided training in and collective memory of democratic communities and attempts at cooperative economics among African Americans. Some of the communities, especially those organized by African Americans for their own independence, such as the Combahee River Colony, were much more separatist in desire and collective in practice. DeFilippis notes that some socialist communes were radical:
While the black communes emerged in the 1830s and were explicitly geared toward reproducing agrarian and mercantile capitalism in black communities, there was a parallel and yet completely different history of nineteenth-century communes and collectives that were oriented toward exactly the opposite goal—creating places outside the constraints and structures of the emergent industrial capitalist world of wage slavery and employment-based production. These “utopian” communities were attempts at local-scale communism, and they were largely divided between secular and religious communes, although there was a good deal of overlap. (2004, 39)3
Although none of the Owenite communes were predominantly African American—most had no Black members at all (because Blacks and Whites were not supposed to live together)—an exception was the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. As noted above, the NAEI invited interracial membership and allowed Black leadership. The Nashoba Commune was supposed to be, first, a predominantly Black utopian society (or at least training ground), and, second, an integrated utopian society whose purpose was to provide opportunities for African Americans to learn communal living while earning enough to buy their freedom and passage to Haiti or Liberia. Unlike the NAEI, Nashoba was not particularly egalitarian and did not encourage Black leadership. While not particularly successful, Nashoba lasted longer than some of Owen’s White socialist utopian communes. Nonetheless, according to DeFilippis, the history of nineteenth-century Black “organized communities” provides the “roots for the emergence of community ownership” and community control in the United States (2004, 38).
Mutual-Aid and Beneficial Societies
Collective practice and leadership among independent African Americans was more evident in the more prevalent and very successful African American mutual-aid and beneficial societies. The majority of early African American cooperative economic activity revolved around benevolent societies, beneficial societies, mutual-aid societies, and, more formally and more commonly, mutual insurance companies. Many of these societies were integrally connected with religious institutions or people with the same religious affiliation, and they established educational, health, social welfare, moral, and economic services for their members. Chief among the activities was care for widows and children, the elderly, and the poor, and provision of burial services.4 Woodson describes a “tendency toward mutual helpfulness” among the enslaved and notes that free Negroes in the South “were well known for their mutual helpfulness.” In addition, “wherever Negroes had their own churches benevolence developed as the handmaiden of religion” (1929, 202).
The purpose of these mutual-aid societies was to “provide people with the basic needs of everyday life—clothing, shelter, and emotional and physical sustenance” (Jones 1985, 127). In addition to social welfare functions, many of the societies promoted temperance and other middle-class and Christian values; but they also protected fugitives and free African Americans from kidnappers (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010, 116). Berry notes that “African Americans had long been in the habit of forming mutual assistance associations, providing help when government refused to help. For African Americans, such mediating institutions historically provided the only available social assistance” (2005, 61). Similarly, Weare contends that mutual aid was a “pragmatic response to social and economic needs. In many cases autonomous Negro societies were organized only after Black leaders were rebuffed when they sought to join existing white groups” (1993, 8).
According to Hine, Hine and Harrold, “the earliest Black community institutions were mutual aid societies” (2010, 116). Du Bois notes their large numbers and wide ramifications by 1907 (1907, 93). Berry calls mutual aid “one component of the broad effort at community care among African Americans, which included secret societies, homes for children, old-age homes, and a flexible family system for individuals throughout the life cycle” (2005, 64). In addition, Black Freemason societies united Black men regionally and were a major social movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010, 117). Fraternities and secret societies were equally plentiful and influential. Woodson observes that “while they were secret in procedure and benevolent in purpose these fraternal agencies offered unusual opportunities for community effort, the promotion of racial consciousness, and the development of leadership” (1929, 205).
Most scholars of this era (Berry 2005; Weare 1993; Pollard 1980; Woodson 1929; Du Bois 1898 and 1907, for example) note the connection between mutual aid and religious activity. As Du Bois observed:
Of the 236 efforts and institutions reported in this inquiry [about practical insurance and benevolence], seventy-nine are churches. Next in importance to churches come the Negro secret societies. . . . Of the organizations reported ninety-two were secret societies—some, branches or imitations of great white societies, some original Negro inventions. . . . There are, however, many Negro organizations whose sole object is to aid and reform. First among these come the beneficial societies. . . . These beneficial organizations have spread until to-day there are many thousands of them in the United States. They are mutual benefit associations and are usually connected with churches. Of such societies twenty-six are returned in this report. (1898, 4–5)
Interestingly, the first independent Black church in the United States, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, was established by the leaders of the second African American mutual-aid society in the country, the Free African Society in Philadelphia. The first official mutual-aid society was organized in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1780 (Hine, Hine and Harrold 2010), followed by the Free African Society (often erroneously believed to be the first), established by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in 1787. Allen and Jones also founded the AME Church in Philadelphia in 1816. Six years earlier, the first African American insurance company, African Insurance Company, was established in Philadelphia (Du Bois 1907, 98). The Negro convention movement also began in Philadelphia, in 1830, and was an important stimulus to the growth of beneficial societies across the nation (Pollard 1980, 231). Here we see the interconnectedness in one city between the different forms of society and help, and between the various institutions that provided them with solidarity and support.
Black mutual-aid and beneficial societies spread rapidly in the early 1800s, especially in the North and in urban areas (Jones 1985, 126; Weare 1993). Although more common in the North, many southern cities, such as New Orleans, Charleston (Berry 2005), and Richmond (Weare 1993), also had these societies. By 1830 there were more than a hundred mutual-aid societies in Philadelphia alone, and about thirty in Baltimore. In 1855, 9,762 African Americans were members of 108 Black mutual-aid societies in Philadelphia (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010, 183). Du Bois (1907) focused much of his research on the various societies in Baltimore.
Du Bois (1898, 19) described the business methods of beneficial societies. A group of people who know each other through their neighborhood or church or other organization join an organization to provide a service or set of services. They agree to pay an initial fee to join and a weekly or monthly fee to keep the common fund operating. A specified portion is paid to any member who needs the service, whether he or she is sick and needs a doctor, hospitalization, an income while convalescing, or needs to be buried or needs food or clothing. Sometimes other members donate their services instead of, or in addition to, funds from the organization’s treasury. Some societies hire their own doctor or nurse to attend to members’ health needs (Berkeley 1985). According to Pollard, these societies paid death benefits of between $10 and $20, and sick benefits from $1 to $3, each on premiums of 25 cents on average (1980, 231). Weare similarly records that premiums ranged from 25 to 37 cents per month and that benefits ranged from $1.50 to $3 per week for sickness and $10 to $20 for death claims (1993, 9). Many families belonged to two or more aid societies in order to increase their sick benefits.
Although the first mutual-aid societies were male only or dominated by men, by the 1790s women had established their own mutual-aid and beneficial societies (Berkeley 1985; Jones 1985; Lerner 1974; Boylan 1984). Berkeley contends that “black women were often in the vanguard in founding and sustaining autonomous organizations designed specifically to improve social conditions within their respective communities. . . . In creating autonomous institutions to solve the problems caused by inadequate health care services, substandard housing, economic deprivation, and segregated schools, black women served notice that they felt a special responsibility to provide social welfare programs for their communities” (1985, 184). Black women established day nurseries, orphanages, homes for the aged and infirm, hospitals, cemeteries, night schools, and scholarship funds (Berkeley 1985; Jones 1985; Lerner 1974). They pooled “meager resources,” sponsored fund-raisers, solicited voluntary contributions (Berkeley 1985, 85), and used modest dues that even the “poorest women managed to contribute” to meet vital social welfare needs (Jones 1985). Women’s mutual-aid societies proliferated and were sometimes more numerous than all-male or men-oriented ones, and became influential in the Black community throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s. “In 1793 Philadelphia’s Female Benevolent Society of St. Thomas took over the welfare functions of the city’s Free African Society” (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010, 116). This was one of the first female societies among African Americans. Other Black women’s societies in Philadelphia included the Benevolent Daughters, the Daughters of Africa, and the American Female Bond Benevolent Society. In Petersburg, Virginia, half of the mutual-aid societies were exclusively female, such as the Sisters of Friendship, Sisters of Charity, and Ladies Union (Jones 1985, 126).
Mutual-aid, benevolent, self-improvement, and fraternal organizations also proliferated after the Civil War (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 2010, 183). Berry explains that after emancipation, African Americans sought to pool their resources and work together in order to survive (2005, 102). Those who were free before the Civil War provided the only economic base the African American community had immediately after emancipation. The mutual-aid societies provided a structure for their collective efforts.5 Petersburg, Virginia, had twenty-two different voluntary societies in 1898 (Jones 1985). The Workers’ Mutual Aid Association in Virginia, for example, was organized in 1894. In 1898 it had twelve stockholders and two salaried officers, 10,053 members, an annual income of $3,600, and property worth $550 (Du Bois 1898). It paid sick and death benefits totaling $1,700 during that year (20). The Cotton Jammers and Longshoremen’s Association No. 2 of Galveston, Texas, was more than a trade union, according to Du Bois. It invested $1,000 in tools. Members and “different gangs at work” paid dues to the organization, and the association paid sick and death benefits (26).
By 1898, 15 percent of Black men and 52 percent of Black women in New York City belonged to a mutual-aid society, even though nationally the number of mutual-aid societies was beginning to decline (Du Bois 1898, 19). If New York City is typical, women were overwhelmingly members of mutual-aid societies at the end of the nineteenth century. And although there were fewer aid organizations by the beginning of the twentieth century, the record shows that many remained strong and effective. It is important to note that while the federal Freedmen’s Bureau engaged in similar efforts to help newly freed African Americans during the first Reconstruction era, this did not prevent African Americans from organizing on their own and continuing to provide aid through local (and sometimes regional) Black-owned and Black-controlled organizations.
The Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association
Mary Frances Berry, in her biography of Callie House, describes the dual purpose of the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, founded in 1896 in Tennessee. The primary purpose was to pressure legislators to enact legislation to establish pensions for ex-slaves. Its secondary purpose was to provide aid and relief to members in need. The mutual-aid function operated continuously, even after the pension movement declined, kept the organization solvent, and helped to protect it from prosecution for mail fraud (as a lobbying organization, the association was accused of accepting unlawful payments through the mail). Even after giving up the pension legislation mission by 1916, the association remained a mutual-aid society, some of the chapters continuing mutual-aid activities until 1931 (Berry 2005). Berry’s biography provides a comprehensive account of the organization’s operations, members’ political activities, and the importance of the association’s mission to provide economic and social welfare safety nets.
The National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association took on what was “essentially a poor people’s movement” (Berry 2005, 51), demanding pensions for the formerly enslaved to compensate for years of unpaid labor. The association also provided medical and burial assistance. In addition, it offered a democratic structure in which local people had control and a voice, “at a time when blacks were practically disfranchised or on the verge of becoming so throughout the South” (51–52). The association emphasized self-help, and local chapters were required to use part of their dues for sick benefits and the burial of members (61). Many of the founders and charter members of the association already had experience in a mutual-aid society. Lead organizer Callie House “emphasized the need for local mutual benefit activities as the linchpin of their solidarity” (94). Members paid an initial fee of 25 cents, plus 20 cents per month in dues. Local organizations paid $2.50 for a charter. Also, if needed, the association could collect “extraordinary” collections of 5 cents per member to defray unusual expenses.
Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke
Elsa Barkley Brown explores the role of Maggie Lena Walker and other women in the development and expansion of the Independent Order of Saint Luke, which was failing when Walker became grand secretary in 1899. The Independent Order of Saint Luke began as a women’s sickness and death mutual-benefit association in Maryland in 1867. The organization accepted men starting in the 1880s, when it expanded to New York and Virginia (Barkley Brown 1989, 616). When Walker took over, a majority of the board of directors were also women. They became politically active in their communities and served as role models for other women and girls. Walker “insisted that organization and expansion of women’s roles economically and politically were essential ingredients without which the community, the race, and even black men could not achieve their full potential” (621). Women members argued that their community could not be developed fully by men alone, and that Black women had to be integral to the process (629). Walker also institutionalized a notion of family that encompassed everyone who worked within the organization (619), which helped to cement community ties.
Walker built up the Richmond branch of the Order of Saint Luke, which later became the organization’s headquarters, adding a department store and a bank (the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank) in 1903; the purpose of the bank was to provide loans to the community. The Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank also owned six hundred homes by 1920. By 1929 it had bought up all the other Black-owned banks in Richmond and became the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, the board of which was chaired by Walker. “By 1924, the Independent Order of Saint Luke had 50,000 members, 1500 local chapters, a staff of 50 working in its Richmond headquarters and assets of almost $400,000” (Bois 1998).
In terms of Walker’s leadership and perspective on Black women and collective action, Barkley Brown writes:
Undergirding all of their work was a belief in the possibilities inherent in the collective struggle of black women in particular and of the black community in general. Walker argued that the only way in which black women would be able “to avoid the traps and snares of life” would be to “band themselves together, organize, . . . put their mites together, put their hands and their brains together and make work and business for themselves.” The idea of collective economic development was not a new idea for these women, many of whom were instrumental in establishing the Woman’s Union, a female insurance company founded in 1898. . . . The institutionalization of this notion of family cemented the community. (618–19)
Barkley Brown makes several important points about how collective economic activity came naturally to the Black women leaders of Saint Luke’s, because they had been involved in other organizing and economic development activity. The women also recognized that men needed to work together with them. This created a strong institution that expanded economically, socially, and politically.
Major Contributions of Mutual-Aid Societies
In addition to providing assistance to members, mutual-aid and beneficial societies also taught members many skills, both individually and collectively. Du Bois (1907) lists four major contributions: they encouraged economic cooperation, inspired self- and group confidence, consolidated small amounts of capital, and taught business methods. These important skills were transferable to other spheres of life, and set the stage for future collective economic activities. There are many examples throughout this volume of African American women and men who were first involved in mutual aid and then became involved in more formal cooperative businesses. Halena Wilson, the president of the Ladies’ Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a co-op developer, started out as the leader of a mutual-aid society, for example (see chapters 4 and 7). Charles Prejean, the former executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, another example, notes that many of the early activists in Black southern cooperative economic efforts in the 1950s and ’60s had first been members of community-level benevolent organizations. This experience “brought to [cooperative economic efforts] some skills that were very useful to the organization” (Prejean 1992, 15). Some mutual-aid organizations transitioned into formal businesses, particularly mutual insurance companies, which were the earliest of the formal cooperatives.
