Utopian Visions of the Seventh Ward: Cooperative Organizing in 1890s New Orleans

Historians point to the late 1890s as the nadir for labor and civil rights organizing in New

Orleans. For example, in 1894, in the midst of a four-year-long national depression, a violent

race riot in the city’s dockyards imploded a thriving biracial labor movement. Two years later, an

interracial Populist movement conceded electoral defeat, while Plessy vs. Ferguson enshrined

racial segregation. However, studying cooperative organizing during this period re-centers our

understanding of New Orleanian labor history, revealing the extent to which neighborhood

cooperatives can implement viable economic alternatives, while inscribing their moral economy

on the physical landscape of their community. My conference paper examines how, in February

1897, at a moment of profound social, economic, and political transformation, unemployed

African American, Cuban, and immigrant dockworkers founded the Brotherhood of Co-operative

Commonwealth (BCC). The socialist cooperative demanded unemployment relief for residents

by championing a far-reaching municipal public works system that would employ thousands of

workers, hoping to provide a blueprint for socialized governance and cooperative economics.

In my paper, I analyze the BCC’s nine-month trajectory, attending to the ways in which it offered

its members a sense of belonging and a concrete program for community restructuring. Seeking

to politically and economically empower laborers, regardless of race, gender, or class, the

cooperative strove to reorder New Orleans into the rational utopia of Edward Bellamy’s Looking

Backward, while also celebrating the Afro-Creole and Cuban Seventh Ward as a site of utopian

possibility. Although short-lived, the BCC captures the city’s labor movement in flux: Animated

by a transnational solidarity, the BCC’s vision of international brotherhood, cooperative

economics, and democratic Socialism would shape future integrated cooperative projects.

Ultimately, I argue, the multiracial BCC reveals an accretion of ongoing political activity that

contributes to a genealogy of social protest and grassroots mobilization.