Houston County, TX, December 11, 1886. Sixteen Black men gathered on a farm and started something that would grow into one of the most ambitious economic organizing efforts in US history. They called it the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union (CFNACU). Within five years, it had spread across the South and claimed 1.2 million members. Then, in 1891, it was violently destroyed.
Most Americans have never heard of it. That is exactly the problem.
Jessica Gordon Nembhard, a political economist and scholar of Black cooperative economics, described this endeavor in an interview with NPQ as: “A mutual aid society, a labor union, a cooperative development enterprise and a political party… I think the fact that the CFNACU combined so many interests and issues explains why it was probably the largest Black organization in US history.”
Active in southern states, including Arkansas, western Tennessee, and Alabama, the organization was made up Black workers who realized that the economic structure of the country had been rigged against them, condemning them to remain landless and poor, so they decided to create their own economy.
Read the rest at Nonprofit Quarterly
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