In 1897, the confluence of a four-year national depression; interracial violence; unpredictable flooding and epidemics; and legalized segregation and disenfranchisement spelled intense social disruption for New Orleanians of color and impoverished whites. Trem-based Creoles of color joined a renewed effort to bring utopian socialism to bear on state-sanctioned economic and political oppression. Meeting in integrated labor halls and saloons, multiracial socialists and labor activists translated American, Caribbean, and European utopian socialist theory into a cooperative blueprint for equitably integrating unemployed workers into the city’s economic structure. These interracial utopian socialists, called the Brotherhood of Co-operative Commonwealth, and later, the Laboring Men’s Protective Association, built coalitions with labor, women’s rights, and political reform allies to temporarily reknit the city’s fractured labor movement, improve the city’s crumbling infrastructure, and implement an egalitarian public welfare system to benefit all New Orleanians.