Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice

2012b). Cooperatives range across the globe from small-scale to multi-million-dollar businesses. There are more than one billion members of cooperatives throughout

African American co-op movement. I consider the various organizations’ agendas and strategies over time, as well as the kinds of impact cooperative practices have had on Black communities. There are lessons to be learned from the history of cooperative economic models that can be applied to future discussions about community economic development in

Cooperative enterprises, however, modify capitalist principles by limiting the amount of dividends earned, limiting

use. Although they were not a well-publicized economic structure before 2012, cooperatives are a significant force in the world economy. Building on the successful year of cooperatives, the ICA and UN have now declared the following ten years to be the international decade of cooperatives.

Du Bois argued that cooperatives would provide the economic opportunities denied to African Americans, and would allow Blacks to serve the common good rather

than be slaves to market forces (Du Bois 1933b).

voting power, and limiting the number of shares any one member may own (Emelianoff 1995, 83). In cooperative enterprises, the three major interests of any business—ownership, control, and beneficiary—are all “vested directly in the hands of the user” (ICA 2007). Cooperatives are organizations

the case that what we called Du Bois’s theory of racial cooperative economic development,7 combined with Hogan’s theory of Black self-help and the model of Mondragon Cooperative Corporation among the Basque people in northern Spain,

Haynes and I have also identified the elements of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in northern Spain that are replicable and illustrate networked cooperative economic development