How Centuries of Black Strength Created a Blueprint for Economic Recovery
Black communities have for centuries harbored a spirit of support and mutual aid. It’s time the rest of the country followed their lead.
There is no level of reparation that could ever make up for the devastating impact of white cruelty on African Americans. But long before any such repair was even being floated in mainstream culture, Black Americans were busy repairing things for themselves. In fact, white oppression in America has always been matched by an even greater ingenuity and resilience from Black communities. The more Black people were shunned and segregated from the rest of the American society, the more they were forced to invent the kinds of circular economic and local reinvestment strategies the rest of us are discovering only now.
The fact that Black lives are finally coming to matter in America does not introduce some new encumbrance on anyone. On the contrary, dating back to at least the 1700s, Black Americans developed and deployed robust approaches to mutual aid and cooperative economics. We can all learn from the Black experience right now as we look toward sustaining ourselves during lockdown and remaking our economy without the benefit of a functioning federal government.
The stories have been hidden in many cases because economic success in Black communities inevitably leads to white jealousy, which in turn inspires more oppression, pogroms, and murder. And because co-ops and mutual aid can sound downright communist to the uninformed, even many modern civil rights activists didn’t want to be condemned as “red” on top of everything else.
Comprehensively chronicled in the highly accessible book Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by John Jay professor Jessica Gordon Nembhard, PhD, Black economic cooperativism began informally among slaves, who would collectively raise money to purchase someone’s freedom. Then, almost like chain migration, the freed slave would save money to get another out, and so on. Nembhard even frames the Underground Railroad as a form of collective knowledge and resource sharing — a commons of data and hideouts.
