"They've Opened their Own Grocery Store": Black Women's Cooperative Business Organizing as a Means of Community Uplift

This paper examines Black women’s leadership in organizing cooperative grocery stores, and how cooperative economics was used to alleviate poverty and create more economic independence for African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. I explore this topic through the lives and activism of two African American women who led cooperative grocery stores in the late 1960s: Marian Kidd in Newark, New Jersey, and Cora Walker in Harlem, New York. Both women organized co-ops with low-income members of their community in the context of the Great Society’s War on Poverty. For example, Kidd led the Consumer’s Buying Club co-op which was established in 1967 in the wake of the Newark Rebellion by Black women who were welfare recipients. After their welfare checks arrived, the women would pool their money to purchase bulk items from a distribution center and then sell the items at cost to co-op members and the larger community. As welfare recipients, the women who formed the co-op were reliant on the state for several basic needs, but the amount they received was not enough to support their families. In operating the grocery store, these women constructed a critique of the state for failing to adequately provide for not only welfare recipients but the black community as a whole in Newark. Studying these cooperative businesses shows how the ideologies of self-help and self-determination that thrived in the Black Power era were pragmatically applied to the lives of the most economically marginalized people. By investigating the various interactions between Black-owned cooperative businesses, consumers in the community, and the state, this paper will provide new insight into how black people have understood and navigated the economy in their search for economic and racial liberation.