TERENCE: For anyone watching this or listening, I want to encourage them to
read the book "Collective Courage" by Dr. Gordon Nembhard, as she really chronicles at a very,
very substantial level some of the history and if I could summarize that.. Since
Africans were brought here to United States, folks have always had to
organize themselves for mutual aid. The context of their lives required that. Being enslaved people,
provided with meager resources to sustain themselves, collectivizing economics was essential
and that continued on through the 18th century, 19th century, even during the Jim Crow era. Again,
it was critical that people work together under segregation. There weren't many options elsewhere,
and even more so in rural places. Even to this day--that's been historically true but I would
argue even to this day--all the metrics one can identify in urban spaces that demonstrate how
oppression is occurring in black communities, be it policing, be it poverty, be it crime, be it
any host of things you can point to, those are found in rural communities and sometimes in more
extremes. So even back then in the '60s when the federation was formed, the objective conditions
there required that people work together. And what happened in our particular history is that
you had civil rights workers, from SNCC, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, and CORE,
Congress On Racial Equality, they went into these rural communities like they did in
Mississippi and elsewhere, but I think with the particular workers that encountered our people,
what became our membership, they found folks who were not
unorganized. They were already organized in what you might call proto-cooperative forms.
They didn't always call what they were doing a cooperative but in essence they were pooling their
resources to reduce costs, to get better prices, and to try to kind of spread the risk. What the
civil rights workers brought to the table was a network. They were part of a regional network
of people doing the same thing and what those rural communities brought to the table was this
organizational forum. From my analysis of the federation's history, I think that really sets
the federation apart from a lot of its contemporaries at the time. Few organizations
were as consciously and intentionally working at the intersection of race and class
as the federation was. From the very outset, the work was about organizing black rural communities,
not only to deal with the impact of Jim Crow, but to organize themselves for economic justice,
to build economic power through cooperative development. That was a very conscious
approach. I would even add, one could say it was intersectional, not that they thought of
it that way, but from the very beginning we had black women leaders at the core driving the work.
That's what the core of everything was looking like. In addition to that,
many of those early members were landowners who had experience either directly or indirectly,
all the various machinations that public and private forces utilized to disempower black folks
and to rob them of a land resource. That really precipitated the formation of the federation in
1967, 22 cooperatives from throughout the South came together here in Atlanta
and formed the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund,
and 55 years later one of the great successes we've had was growing that number from 22 to
more than 75 ag-based cooperatives. The work of the federation, in many ways, has preserved
black farmers in the region, has preserved a traditional black cooperative development,
and in some ways, preserved some modicum of a rural middle class among black folks
that were able to send their kids to college and learn and do all sorts of things.
So that 50-year history is really rooted in real
work to maintain cooperative economics as a way of survival and collective prosperity.