Abstract
Situated against the generations-long loss of Black agricultural land in the United States, this article revisits the role of Farm Security Administration cooperatives in negotiating land dispossession, racial segregation, and organized abandonment in the American South during the Great Depression. Ambiguously positioned between the Washingtonian model of self-help and the Du Boisian mantra of cooperation, these state-initiated enterprises ultimately presented a paradox: they enabled spaces of opposition to the routinized violence and land theft perpetrated under Jim Crow yet also proved assimilable into the prevailing logics of American racial capitalism—namely, by absorbing the surpluses generated by a rapidly mechanizing plantation economy and shifting the financial burden of the New Deal’s social welfare expenditures onto impoverished Black communities. The article begins with a discussion of the regional Black tradition of cooperative organization, collectivism, and mutual aid that was contemporaneously denied by state administrators and retrospectively obscured in historiography. It then examines three federal resettlement projects in the Black Belt region of Alabama: the Tuskegee Land Use Demonstration Project and Prairie Farms, both in Macon County; and Gee’s Bend in Wilcox County. The conclusion reflects on W. E. B. Du Bois’s unfulfilled vision for a Black cooperative network, the wartime withdrawal of funding from federal experiments in cooperative development, and the persistence of cooperatives within a repertoire of anticapitalist and decolonial world-building.
