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