The Brotherhood of Co-operative Commonwealth: Modernizing Infrastructure and Public Welfare at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

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.

Unearthing a Genealogy of Grassroots Economic Development

The introduction frames the book as a critical intervention in the current debate about the role of alternative grassroots models in modernizing mainstream political and economic structures. After framing the political and theoretical issues at stake in New Orleans’s cooperative movement, the introduction outlines how historical local cooperatives interact with transnational cooperative principles to improve their community, expand opportunities for civic participation, and reform systems of governance. Each chapter’s case study represents consumer, producer, or distribution cooperatives that manifest different visions of ideal capital-worker relations and are inspired by local and international utopian socialist, Rochdale, and hybrid racial justice cooperative models. Each example is constitutive of black, working-class, female, and immigrant residents particular subject positions and economic needs. Consequently, the book articulates and debates citizens relationship the state, an ideological drama that plays out in the city’s social spaces to either propel or retard larger challenges to capitalism.

Conclusion

The conclusion assesses the role and significance of each cooperative within the broader New Orleans cooperative movement. Locally responsive, internationally inspired New Orleanian cooperative-city partnerships continue to provide a scalable model of equitable bioregionalism promoting economic and environmental sustainability. Rooted in specific neighborhoods and organized by longtime community activists, glocalized cooperatives intimately understand resident needs and draw on a common community identity and mutual aid traditions to recruit members. Ultimately, New Orleans’s internationally-inspired cooperatives can be models for other marginalized communities seeking democratic alternatives to both free market globalism and unchecked nationalism.

The Consumers’ Co-operative Union: Embedding Integrated Popular Front and War on Poverty Social Programs in the South

Chapter three analyzes radical Great Depression- and World War II-era consumer cooperatives in working-class Freret neighborhood as their anti-racist, socialist calls for a complete overhaul of the capitalist system careened into their constituents desire for economic expediency. Opening an integrated grocery store called Consumers’ Co-operative Union, along with host of affiliated cooperatives, German, black, and Latin American organizers muted their Popular Front sympathies to lower the cost of living for racially mixed Freret residents and implement New Deal economic reforms in the South. Although critics charged that Rochdale cooperatives were too apolitical, and while radicals’ principles were co-opted to serve a capitalist agenda, chapter three illuminates how the city’s mid-twentieth-century credit union movement embedded Popular Front ideals into Great Society social policies. Credit unions operated as political channel for marginalized communities, situating New Orleans urban growth within the context of the long civil rights movement.

The New Orleans Housewives’ League: White Women’s Political Equality and Consumer Reform

Chapter two explores how early- to mid-twentieth century New Orleans socialists grappled with two central questions: could an embattled Rochdale consumer cooperative model thrive within a capitalist system, or should it presage a fundamental social, political, and economic transformation? The chapter traces cooperatives overlooked contributions to Progressive female economic institution-building and white women’s enfranchisement during the 1910s and 1920s. White Uptown New Orleanian women studied contemporary American and British socialists who equitably wove women, laborers, and agricultural producers into a national economic plan encompassing cooperative housing, production, health insurance, medical care, and education. Specifically, educated, affluent, and ethnically heterogenous cooperative activists replicated CLUSA’s chain store cooperative networks, which they folded into a broad-based consumer rights platform modernizing and expanding the city’s grocery retail industry and public market system.

The Louisiana Association of Cooperatives and Gathering Tree Growers’ Collective: Rebuilding a Cooperative Food Economy in Katrina’s Aftermath

Chapter five documents the legacy of hybrid racial justice cooperatives on the post-Hurricane Katrina recovery projects the Gathering Tree Growers Collective and the Louisiana Association of Cooperatives. New racial justice cooperatives reenacted the historical circulation of goods, people, and ideas across neighborhood, national, and international channels to thread seemingly isolated ethnic enclaves into a robust regional network promoting egalitarian food policy into city and state economic development, labor policies, and land-use plans. In keeping with the International Cooperative Alliance’s aims, minority cooperative activists like Harvey Reed have opened autonomous food cooperatives that spread workplace democracy regionally, nationally, and internationally.

Albert Dent and the Free Southern Theater: Intergenerational Civil Rights Cooperatives and the Fight Against Racialized Economic Inequality

Chapter four follows African American activists generational shift away from black-run Rochdale businesses toward racial justice cooperatives that experimented with communist rhetoric, non-hierarchical collective structures, and African diasporic spiritual and aesthetic practices. Between the 1930s and 1940s, Albert Dent fused southern civil rights activism and global cooperative philosophy to create the Flint-Goodridge Hospital insurance cooperative and public health plan for black patients. Collaborating with white southern New Deal liberals allowed Dent to implement black economic justice and self-advocacy at the city and state level. Between the 1960s and 1980s, writer and playwright Tom Dent incorporated his father’s coalitional strategies into the leftist Free Southern Theater Collective’s cooperative vision. While based in black Ninth Ward and Central City neighborhoods, it worked with local and national antipoverty officials and non-profit organizations to expand a southern network of theatrical, producer, and consumer cooperatives empowering impoverished African Americans without replicating capitalism’s abuses.