In
Collective
Courage,
Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative
business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil
rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907
Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a
full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives.
Collective
Courage
extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players
are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du
Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood
of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer,
Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative
League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the
cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the
African American experience, with an increased understanding of
African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic
organizing.
To
tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period
magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes
from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements;
and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal
the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic
action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that
African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income
people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and
democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.