Creative Collaboration and the Southern Cooperative Movement of the 1960s

• In Event: Creative Dissent: Radical Pedagogies in Twentieth Century Grassroots Movements

Abstract

The Southern Cooperative Movement emerged in the US South during the civil rights movement with the intention of resisting racist labor exploitation through organized cooperatives from agriculture to artisan crafts such as quilters, clothes makers, leatherworkers, and woodworkers. Understanding that political democracy was not achievable even in the aftermath of desegregation and the civil rights movement, local people across the South took initiatives to organize a movement that was influenced by Marxist ideology and practical common sense. Articles in the media praised their self-help efforts, while conservative politicians indicted them as communists. Regardless, the cooperatives understood themselves as part of a multi-ethnic, global cultural movement inspired by similar craft-working and farming collectives in Guyana, Africa, Mexico, Central America, Appalachia, and on Native American reservations. I will look at experimental multi-media narratives created by farmers from both the United Farm Workers Strike in Delano, California and the Batesville Farmer’s Cooperative in Mississippi in order to argue for the inextricable relationship between agricultural labor and self-expression that the cooperative movement encouraged. These multi-media performances acted as pedagogical tools for other exploited farmers and workers across the South and demand us to talk about labor relations, racism, and artistic expression at the same moment. As I turn to artisan labor, I will also examine how women were central to the cooperative movement and how their rejection of wage-labor domestic work in favor of craft cooperatives complicates our view of what women’s work is for oppressed minority groups.

Author

• Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, University of Pittsburgh