Southern pews and pulpits weren’t the only source of people power during the long civil rights movement. So, too, were cooperative economic enterprises. These worker or consumer-owned alternatives to U.S. capitalism helped train and produce civil rights leaders from A. Philip Randolph to Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer to sitting congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.). That historical link, between the civil rights fight and alternative economic self-help, is just one of the surprising nuggets unearthed by economist and community economic development expert Jessica Gordon Nembhard in her book out this May, “Collective Courage: A History of African-American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice.” Gordon Nembhard is a professor in Africana Studies at John Jay College in New York City. Very often the history of cooperative enterprise is the unwritten and undervalued story of marginalized people. She’s already writing her next three books in her head and as with this one, invites everyone now learning about co-ops for the first time to hit her up if they suddenly realize, “Ohhhh! So that’s what my grandmother was doing with the other women in the community.”
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