Dreaming the Present

Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement

Irvin J. Hunt

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781469667942
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a story of art and movement building at the limits of imagination. In their darkest hours, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, George Schuyler, and Fannie Lou Hamer gathered hundreds across the United States and beyond to build vast, but forgotten, networks of mutual aid: farms, shops, schools, banks, daycares, homes, health clinics, and burial grounds. They called these spaces "cooperatives, " local challenges to global capital, where people pooled all they had to meet their needs. By reading their activism as an artistic practice, Irvin Hunt argues that their primary need was to free their movement from the logic of progress. From a remarkably diverse archive, Hunt extrapolates three new ways to describe the time of a movement: a continual beginning, a deliberate falling apart, and a simultaneity, a kind of all-at-once-ness. These temporalities reflect how a people maneuvered the law, reappropriated property, built autonomous communities, and fundamentally reimagined what a movement can be. Their movement was not the dream of a brighter day; it was the making of today out of the stuff of dreams. Hunt offers both an original account of Black mutual aid and, in a world of diminishing futures, a moving meditation on the possibilities of the present.

1 Sustained Incipience

W. E. B. Du Bois and the Negro Cooperative Guild

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some beginning it seemed …

—Nathaniel Mackey, “Song of the Andoumboulou: 58”

Infancies of Light

The spring before Du Bois started his Negro Cooperative Guild in 1918, he sent out a clarion call to begin a new cooperative movement. “I want to begin the work as a great movement and not piecemeal,” he wrote to John Jefferson, dashing a similar message to others. “We could work through the churches and fraternal orders, but only after we have made a successful beginning.”¹ We can imagine Jefferson wondering, But what makes “a successful beginning”? We can speculate that maybe Du Bois is saying that he wants everything and everyone in place and not “piecemeal.” That speculation complies with the Du Bois we today have come to know, the institutionalist, settling for nothing less than an organized attack on capitalist institutions through socialist ones. In this line, the opposite of “piecemeal” is a grand plan with grand foresight. His Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer David Levering Lewis describes him as a titan of foresight: “the premier architect of the civil rights movement.” Likewise, in a recent, ambitious study by Bill Mullen, Du Bois is pictured as someone sagacious enough to “map” not only the world, but a blueprint, a “typology,” of “World Revolution.”²

I see a different Du Bois—call him a shadow Du Bois—in his largely missed and dismissed work on cooperatives (dismissed as reformist and provincial). Let’s return to his call and its wish for a successful start. What might make it most successful, a specific kind of start, say an organized one? If we’re true to the word, the problem there is that such a start would take time to evaluate, which means then we’re no longer talking about beginning but reflecting. Perhaps then the most successful thing, in an oddly circuitous way, would be to simply begin. I think it makes more sense to read his call as saying that the work will begin as a “great movement” only if the beginning is the entirety.

This chapter puts forth an argument for seeing Du Bois’s activism around cooperative economics as fashioning a social movement that would be principally about beginning. It would be more than the “right [to experiment and] to fail,” as Vaughn Rasberry brilliantly argues in his conception of Du Bois’s activism, because this was not “en route to a genuinely emancipatory sequence.”³ It would be more than “the movement of repeating the beginning” after the disasters of the communist states, as Slovoj Žižek counsels us to do, “to ‘descend’ to the starting point and follow a different path.”⁴ All that is about returning to the state of being born, when this was about birth as a state of being.

What we will see is that Du Bois practiced something I call a sustained incipience, something that reminds me of what the poet Elton Glaser calls “infancies of light.” For him, the image names shoots of grass in a cemetery.⁵ For me, it names the quality of light from a particular kind of survival. Sustained incipience is a critical life practice: not only a place, not only a housed establishment or diasporic web of these establishments, as Du Bois would prod by 1946, but a practice of democratizing time.⁶ It was a practice of configuring time as the dual operation, the co-operation, of beginnings and ends, such that the motivation to persist would not be determined by counterattack. The ends toward which political actors worked were always already met as soon as the work began, but because the beginning did not cease, the very notion of meeting ends, and therefore a politics of ends, was thrown into question. We will see Du Bois eventually refusing to move forward on the plans he garnered all the resources and the people to execute. I have called this practice sustained incipience in order to describe an activism and a daring that in the context of teleology would otherwise look like stasis and delay.

I offer an account of Du Bois’s activism by embedding it in the conditions of normalized violence confronting African American communities, as well as in the fraught conjunction between capitalism and cooperatives, businesses owned by their patrons. I offer an answer to a slog of questions: How does one work toward impossible ends? How does one persist? What kind of cooperative model inspires persistence among those who face nightmarish backlash, the lethality of growth? To the extent that Du Bois’s movement was new, it was because it broke with dialectical histories previously charted by other leaders in the cooperative movement, but also on a more personal level it was Du Bois breaking with Du Bois, the socialist firmly invested in Marxist historical reason. As I unravel the history of the Guild and its afterlives, I will show why I think Du Bois’s form of activism fundamentally changes how we understand social movements today.

Roddy’s Cooperative Stores

The story of the Guild really begins with a reign of attacks on Black cooperatives at the end of the nineteenth century. The biggest of these attacks occurred in 1889. The largest producer cooperative in African American history, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union, was disbanded at its headquarters in LeFlore Mississippi by what the Black press almost uniformly called a “massacre.” It had more than a million members across “every Southern state,” making it the largest Black organization in U.S. history at the time. But when a cackle of pistols, an echolalic glee in the hollow of hate, took the lives or banished its primary leaders, members, and their children, it ended.⁷

Three years later in 1892, proprietors of a consumer co-op in Memphis, Tennessee, the People’s Grocery Store, were lynched for amassing competitive profits. As historian Mia Bay notes, this “rocked Black Memphis,” the American South, the African American press, and Ida B. Wells. Because one of the dead was Wells’s close friend, Thomas Moss, it was this event that was the catalyst for her anti-lynching campaign, another moment that proves the long tessellation between cooperatives and African American letters. But she was also, like Du Bois, tired of enduring the perils of prosperity—the white reaction, as she would report from a mouth in the mob—to Blacks “getting too independent.”⁸ Beside these events, Du Bois knew well the scattered record of attacks on snuff-size co-ops: buying clubs, newspaper stands, insurance groups, so many miniventures, shrugs and perseverances, pinched into darkness.

The enormity of this loss is what Du Bois marks when he and his research team admit in their study on Economic Cooperation a confession that could be mine: “The faith of our people in standing by co-operative enterprise in face of the signal failures of cooperative undertakings among us here, is most remarkable.”⁹ Perhaps no one knew better than Du Bois the blazing binds of success, the pyromania of envy and entitled control. Against the demise of a mainly nineteenth-century Black cooperative movement, Du Bois would spend the better half of his life inciting its resurgence, trying, as he said, to “foster and encourage” it. To his Crisis readers, he proclaimed, against all odds, “whatever happens you CANNOT fail as long as your shareholders are true, and they will be true as long as they share in the profits according to their purchases. Don’t be afraid!”¹⁰ We must remember how vulnerable cooperatives were despite government sanction. Co-ops were open targets: legally incorporated, easily slain. That’s why, as I show at the end of this chapter through a novel, essays, and a forensics of ephemera, Du Bois would rely on an affect more fit for these conditions than the futurity of expectant hope.

Crisis magazine offices, circa 1918. Du Bois is standing second from right. Portrait Collection—W. E. B. Du Bois (Item: SC-CN-79-0036), Photographs and Print Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

For the moment, however, hope was enough. In a hot and sticky August in 1918, Du Bois and a dozen community leaders gathered for the long-awaited occasion of finally establishing the Guild. The conference was held at the headquarters for the Crisis magazine. A loft in the center of Harlem, it bore all the signs of safety and safekeeping: thick, skyward walls; enormous, massy windows rebutting the buzz of Fifth Avenue; thin, hanging lamps like upside down communion cups with infancies of light; and all around the desks, floor, and steel front door a variegated white like the surface of the moon. It was naturally here where all seemed possible, here, as Du Bois rejoiced, in a “fine big office building with elevators, light, and air,”¹¹ where James Peter Warbasse, the most prominent figure in the country on economic cooperation, joined the principal of Bluefield Institute Richard Page Sims, president of the NAACP Memphis branch Bert M. Roddy, African American archivist Ruth Anna Fisher, “the first woman ever to be given a key to the British Museum,” and a cluster of other preeminents, all to form the Negro Cooperative Guild.¹²

The idea of the cooperative was mischievously simple: “the phenomenon of a group of people buying and selling to themselves—buying necessities at cost and selling them back at retail prices,” as Du Bois contended. The difference between the two prices would be returned as dividends so as to make the group, Du Bois cheered, “its own middle-man.” Attracted to the idea of reappropriating the surplus as coin and sociality, the Guild still had to think about the points of distribution. Jobs, schools, “pageants,” “parades,” factories, land, “medicine,” and “hospitals” were all floated possibilities.¹³ Comprised of six state secretaries from the Big Apple to peach country, with Fisher as vice president under chairman Du Bois, this big band of eight declaimed “the object of this Guild is first to study co-operation, secondly, to start co-operative stores and thirdly, to combine those into manufacturing and importing establishments.”¹⁴

Yet besides the fact that these plans would soon be halved and humbled, their scope had already been narrowed by Du Bois’s approach to the conference: “small and informal,” wrote Du Bois to one attendee, “but I’m expecting it to be the beginning of bigger things.”¹⁵ The key word was “beginning” without definite ends, for this would be the leitmotif of everything from Du Bois’s purview to the open-endedness of the conference, set at 2 P.M. on Sunday, that day’s close and the next day’s schedule to be decided on ad hoc. Despite or in part because of this mystical openness to such an anticipated, pre-celebrated meeting, announced in the Crisis almost monthly since January, droves across the country, both invitees and onlookers, were positively elated. Warbasse, president of the Cooperative League USA, received his invitation less than a week before the conference day, yet shot back a promissory upon receipt of the letter: “I shall be in New York at the office of the League on the 26th, and shall be glad to attend a meeting at your office to discuss co-operative organization among colored people. Please leave word at the league office as to the time when you would desire my attendance.”¹⁶ A rush of folks kept asking when the event would occur, and when it passed by, letters gusted in asking what was just missed.¹⁷ Everyone could feel it, as much “the beginning of bigger things” as bigger things beginning.

But when the conference was over, Du Bois seemed set on mystifying the contents of the congress: the contentions, the personal fears and projections, the ideological range between the extremes, say, of George Mitchel, the egalitarian and self-effacing secretary for Pennsylvania, and Charles Lane, the clownishly patronizing secretary for D.C. Lane was someone who nonsequitured to Du Bois in a birthday message that same year, “a lawyer friend told me that living among colored people had made me much more tolerant and mellow than I would have been had I not had this experience.”¹⁸ From such a plurality, mirror to the spectrum of cooperative belief, one would easily expect less consensus than concession, less agreement than grief. But unlike Du Bois’s reports of the famed Niagara or Amenia conferences, in which he boasted that barbed differences ultimately fused into a singular vision, Du Bois measured out in droplets his reflections on the Guild’s making.¹⁹ In all his published works, he did not even name the members.

How bizarrely brief for the sole organization of “our economic way out, our industrial emancipation.”²⁰ Someone by the name of C. W. Banton wrote Du Bois asking for “the results of the cooperation meeting,” results which were “mentioned in this month’s Crisis,” he pointed out. Banton was president of D.C.’s Commercial Study Club and intent on helping to fulfill the Guild’s first goal, the establishment of study groups. To Banton, as to all, Du Bois was curt: “the results of our meeting in New York was the formation of the Negro Cooperative Guild.”²¹ Du Bois then listed its three objectives, rather unnecessarily, for, as Banton had already told him, they were “mentioned in this month’s Crisis” (the September issue).

Did Du Bois intend to stoke desire through mystification? In the November Crisis he asked in a report of the Guild, “What is this thing which may be the greatest result of the war? Whatever it is, it is worth study. The Negro Cooperative Guild … [is] encouraging study.”²² For all the promise the Guild beheld, a slim crystal of hope on the wreckage of war, the Guild, like cooperation, would attract the masses through enigma. The allure of this enigma—a conspicuous concealment of who the leaders were—was that it signified the openness of the movement, the freedom of movement, but most of all, the subordination of a new leadership to an old social base.

By the start of 1919 the Guild was in full if zigzag motion. Since returning to West Virginia, state se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Map
• Introduction: The Only Way Out Was In
• 1. Sustained Incipience: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Negro Cooperative Guild
• 2. Planned Failure: George Schuyler, Ella Baker, and the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League
• 3. Pluripresence: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm
• Conclusion: Trouble in the Water
• Afterword: This Bridge Called the System: An Interview with Stephanie Morningstar
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index