Cooperatives in New Orleans

Collective Action and Urban Development

Anne Gessler

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496827586
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Cooperatives have been central to the development of New Orleans. Anne Gessler asserts that local cooperatives have reshaped its built environment by changing where people interact and with whom, helping them collapse social hierarchies and envision new political systems. Gessler tracks many neighborhood cooperatives, spanning from the 1890s to the present, whose alliances with union, consumer, and social justice activists animated successive generations of regional networks and stimulated urban growth in New Orleans. Studying alternative forms of social organization within the city's multiple integrated spaces, women, people of color, and laborers blended neighborhood-based African, Caribbean, and European communal activism with international cooperative principles to democratize exploitative systems of consumption, production, and exchange. From utopian socialist workers' unions and Rochdale grocery stores to black liberationist theater collectives and community gardens, these cooperative entities integrated marginalized residents into democratic governance while equally distributing profits among members. Besides economic development, neighborhood cooperatives participated in heady debates over urban land use, applying egalitarian cooperative principles to modernize New Orleans's crumbling infrastructure, monopolistic food distribution systems, and spotty welfare programs. As Gessler indicates, cooperative activists deployed street-level subsistence tactics to mobilize continual waves of ordinary people seizing control over mainstream economic and political institutions.

NOTES

Introduction

1. Melissa Hoover, interviewed by Steven Dubb, “C-W Interview,” Community Wealth (June 2010), http://community-wealth.org/content/melissa-hoover.

2. Cedric Johnson, “Introduction,” in The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans, ed. Cedric Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xx–xxi, xxxvi; John Arena, “Black, White, Unite and Fight?” in ibid., 152–73; Kent E. Portney, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously: Economic Development, the Environment, and Quality of Life in American Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), vii; Gary Rivlin, Katrina: After the Flood (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2015), 402; “Locations,” Urban Strategies, accessed on July 9, 2014, http://urbanstrategiesinc.org/by-location/; Joel Dinerstein, “Second Lining Post-Katrina,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (September 2009): 615–16.

3. Clyde Woods, “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon, and the Return to the Source” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (September 2009): 446.

4. Hoover, quoted in Dubb, “C-W Interview.”

5. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, “Uplifting and Strengthening Our Community: A Showcase of Cooperatives in New Orleans,” Grassroots Economic Organizing, accessed on October 19, 2014, http://www.geo.coop/node/356.

6. Erin Rice, “The USFWC Work Week: Post Conference Event in New Orleans, June 2008,” Grassroots Economic Organizing, http://geo.coop/node/355, accessed on September 9, 2017.

7. Jeff Brite, quoted in Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo, “USFWC: Ten Years of Achievement, Part 2 of 2,” Grassroots Economic Organizing, http://www.geo.coop/story/usfwc-ten-years-achievement-2, accessed on July 25, 2017.

8. Ruth A. Morton to Ed Yeomans, November 28, 1940, 3, Box 1, Folder 2, Southeastern Cooperative League Records, 1939–1952, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

9. Harvey Reed, interview with author, June 26, 2012, Cooperative Oral History Project.

10. Harvey Reed, “Welcome, Cooperatives in New Orleans and Louisiana: Ted Quant, Harvey Reed,” speech given at the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives Conference, New Orleans, Louisiana, June 21, 2008, http://www.pdfio.com/k-2694397.html#; Greta de Jong, Invisible Enemy: The African American Freedom Struggle After 1965 (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 163; Greta de Jong, “‘From Votes to Vegetables’: Civil Rights Activism and the Low-Income Cooperative Movement in Louisiana after 1965,” in Louisiana Beyond Black and White: New Interpretations of Twentieth-Century Race and Race Relations, ed. Michael S. Martin (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2011), 145–61; Albert J. McKnight, C.S.Sp., Whistling in the Wind: The Autobiography of The Reverend A. J. McKnight, C.S.Sp. (Opelousas: Southern Development Foundation, 1994), 75, 110–12.

11. Reed, interview with author; Anne Todd, “Disasters Spur Co-op Formations: Louisiana Co-op Association Helps Farmers, Fishermen Recover Following Hurricanes and Oil Spill,” Rural Cooperatives (July 1, 2012): 6, https://www.rd.usda.gov/files/RuralCoop_JulyAug12.pdf; Beverly Bell, “A Future for Agriculture, a Future for Haiti,” Louisiana Association of Cooperatives e-newsletter, no. 161 (January 2018): 1.

12. Sally Stevens, interview with author, June 27, 2012, Cooperative Oral History Project; Reed, interview with author; “New Orleans Police Attack Peaceful March at St. Bernard” (December 16, 2007), YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GPjNhVUzqk; Doug Parker, “Photos: Housing Debate Heats Up,” Times-Picayune, December 20, 2007, http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2007/12/photo_council_debates_housing.html.

13. Arena, “Black, White, Unite and Fight?” 172–73; Vincanne Adams, Labors of Faith, Markets of Sorrow: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 5–6.

14. “The Cooperative Economy: A Conversation with Gar Alperovitz,” Orion (May/June–July/August 2014), http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/8163; Diane K. Levy, Jennifer Comey, and Sandra Padilla, Keeping the Neighborhood Affordable: A Handbook of Housing Strategies for Gentrifying Areas (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2006), 38–39; Myungshik Choi, “The Impact of Community Land Trusts on Gentrification” (PhD diss., Texas A&M University, 2015), 150–55.

15. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Fictions (London: Verso, 2007), xii; David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 154.

16. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebel: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 3–4.

17. Arena, “Black, White, Unite and Fight?” 172–73; Adams, Labors of Faith, 5–6.

18. Paula Giese, “How the Old Coops Went Wrong,” in Workplace Democracy and Social Change, eds. Frank Lindenfeld and Joyce Rothschild-Whitt (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1982), 315.

19. Pierre Bourdieu, “Utopia of Endless Exploitation: The Essence of Neoliberalism,” Le Monde Diplomatique (December 1998), http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu.

20. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 159.

21. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 26.

22. Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), xi.

23. Richard Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans (Lafayette: University of Louisiana, 2008), 185–87.

24. Shirley Thompson, Exiles at Home (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 82.

25. Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma, 152, 185–86; Warner, “Freret’s Century,” 343.

26. Thompson, Exiles at Home, 6.

27. Justin A. Nystrom, New Orleans After the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 213.

28. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2008), 69.

29. Thompson, Exiles at Home, 74–78, 81–82.

30. George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 8.

31. “Mishaps and Misdeeds,” Daily Picayune, May 19, 1884, 8, Advance Local Media; “Mishaps and Misdeeds,” ibid., August 25, 1890, 2.

32. “Bacarisse Resigns from Laboring Men,” Daily Picayune, August 30, 1897, 3, Advance Local Media.

33. “Officer Fredericks is Accused of Murder,” Daily Picayune, December 16, 1905, 4, Advance Local Media; “Policeman Who Shot Harmless Negro,” ibid., January 11, 1906, 5; “Trenchard Fined and Transferred,” ibid, January 30, 1906, 4; “Grand Jury,” ibid., February 21, 1906, 4.

34. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 13.

35. Macon Fry, interview with author, June 10, 2012, Cooperative Oral History Project; Julia Africa, “Community Gardens as Healing Spaces,” Harvard University Graduate School of Design, last updated 2011, http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k94076&pageid=icb.page577179; Leonard N. Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans: Police Brutality and African American Activism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 10–11.

36. Jocine Velasco, interview with author, June 24, 2012, Cooperative Oral History Project.

37. Reed, interview with author.

38. John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860–1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 139–47, 151, 164–69; Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 42, 101; Woods, “Katrina’s World,” 446; Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University, 2009), 40–41, 72–73; Kent B. Germany, New Orleans After the Promises (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 31.

39. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

40. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, xi; Kelley, Race Rebels, 2–5.

41. Thompson, Exiles at Home, 114–33.

42. Gilles Vandal, “Black Utopia in Early Reconstruction New Orleans: The People’s Bakery,” Louisiana History 38, no. 4 (Autumn 1997); 444; Giese, “How the Old Coops Went Wrong,” 322; Jonathan Garlock, Guide to the Local Assemblies of the Knights of Labor (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982), xi.

43. Covington Hall, Labor Struggles in the Deep South and Other Writings, ed. David R. Roediger (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1999), 24.

44. Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 116; Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy; The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 69–71; Thompson, Exiles at Home, 109; Vandal, “Black Utopia,” 437–39.

45. Germany, New Orleans After the Promises, 28, 29; “Historical Scope and Notes,” 1, Box 1, New Orleans Black Benevolent Associations Collection, 1872–1950, Xavier University Archives and Special Collections, Xavier University.

46. David Elliot Draper, Mardi Gras Indians: The Ethnomusicology of Black Association in New Orleans (PhD diss., Tulane University, 1973), 31.

47. Rachel Lorraine Emanuel and Alexander P. Tureaud, A More Noble Cause: A. P. Tureaud and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 123; Joel Dinerstein, interview with author, July 1, 2012.

48. Germany, New Orleans After the Promises, 31.

49. Thompson, Exiles at Home, 100–101.

50. Dr. Ernest Cherrie to JCFBMAA President, Officers and Members, September 6, 1933, Box 1, Folder 1, Juvenile Co-operators Fraternals Benevolent Mutual Aid Association Records, Xavier University Archives and Special Collections, Xavier University. Hereafter cited as JCFBMAA Records.

51. Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2005), 76, 88, 200; Vandal, “Black Utopia,” 441–48; Fairclough, Race and Democracy, 69–71.

52. Giese, “How the Old Coops Went Wrong.”

53. Mrs. Howard Egleston, “The Co-operative Movement in New Orleans and the South,” in Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, at the Forty-Seventh Annual Session Held in New Orleans, Louisiana, April 14–21, 1920 (Chicago, 1920), 306.

54. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003), 25; de Jong, “From Votes to Vegetables,” 145–46; Rivlin, Katrina: After the Flood, 148.

55. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009), 11.

56. Vandal, “Black Utopia,” 440.

57. Ibid., 440–44; Ellen C. Merrill, Germans of Louisiana (Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2005, 91).

58. Lafcadio Hearn, “Jewish Emigrants for Louisiana,” in Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, ed. S. Frederick Starr (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 162–64; Robert P. Sutton,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Unearthing a Genealogy of Grassroots Economic Development
• Section One: Utopian Socialist Cooperatives
• Section Two: Rochdale Cooperatives
• Section Three: Hybrid Racial Justice Cooperatives
• Conclusion: Hope for a Cooperative Life: Forecasting Cooperative Trends
• Notes
• Reference List
• About the Author