Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that people can do good things in the face of bad things. I guess it doesn't have to be the middle name of the podcast. I guess it could just be the tagline. I'm willing to conceive that anyway. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is Joel Monique.
I hate not much.
We had a we had a break between parts one and two, and I am covered in sawdust and I'm not going to tell you why. I told them why.
I take a nap. For sure, I thought, okay, I thought to take a nap too, all night on the streets and then you're covered in sawdust, just redoing my kitchen, just casual like. I was like, wow, yeah, no.
I I went out to my yard and which made my dog happy, and I started taking a nap in the hammock. And then I was like, what if I go inside and do things. I'm just fucked. It'll be fine. But our producer today is Sharen Hi, Seren.
Hi guys, wow, grill to be here.
Yeah, And our audio engineers Daniel Hi, Danel Hey, Dana Sreen. We can't continue until you say Hi, Danel. I'm sorry so sorry, Daniel.
Hi, we miss you so much, love you, thanks so much for all you.
No, it's okay. See now, when I accidentally forget to have everyone say hi Danel, it becomes like a thing. My brain is totally wired normally. Anyway, our theme music was written for us by un Woman and today is part two in a two parter of I actually haven't come up with the final title of it yet because what this podcast was about changed at eleven pm last night.
But it's about the development of mutual aid and cooperative economics within the black community in the United States, and that's where we're at.
That's a solid title right there.
I know it's not going to like really like catch people necessarily, but like it's descriptive and that is true to the style of the time in terms of naming, right well, except the crisis. The crisis is good name. So anyway, what we're talking about, and at first, can you I already told you that it was like kind of insurance companies based they're not companies, but insurance organizations were the first ones. Any any random guesses as to what the first style of insurance was first.
Oh what was being ensured? Okay, so what I know is post slavery, a lot formerly enslaved people would like become essentially like a nitry servants work on farms and they had like but they had to pay for all their own farm equipment stuff. So maybe maybe like equipment and things like that.
Okay, So that is a good guess because after emancipation, some of the first worker cooperatives that folks develop are to chip in together in order to buy equipment together. But the first insurance organizations were burial societies.
Whoa also makes sense okay, Yeah, yeah, love and undertaker society coming together. Yeah.
So these existed all over the place for all kinds of different communities. It wasn't just black communities doing this. This was a way in which people during this era took care of each other, right, but when white people did it it was legal. Black people did it while literally enslaved. And that's something. These were all over the US. I sort of figured they'd be like, ah, and then there was like three of them. No, there was a lot more in that. Most of the black burial societies
were in the North where it was legal. Although it was still highly content by the black codes and other racist stuff that we'll talk about. But there was fuck tons of people in the South self organizing illegally into mutual aid organizations. As an example, every major city in Virginia had one in the early eighteen hundreds. Basically, what would happen is you'd put in money every month and if you were sick, you would be taken care of.
It was also health insurance. They are called burial societies, but they very very quickly expanded out beyond that. If you're sick, you'd be taken care of, and if you died, your burial expenses would be paid for and your family would be taken care of. And it will never stop blowing my mind that insurance companies start off as like a radical act.
Right of just what a loving thing to do to be like, hey, we all just pull our money then and everyone of us gets sick, we could probably take care of it and it'll be fine. And then to just the taking care of because I mean, I never considered what burial right must be like for people under slavery, Like.
I think it's different everywhere.
I know it's a little bit so like my family is from Alabama, and we found my three or four times great. She still lived in the the sheck after emancipation that she lived in when she was in a slave. She's stayed there her whole life. She's buried on that land. Okay. And I know that there are a lot of like smaller plantations that have like you know, burials, grounds or
whatever it needs buried there. It never occurred to me, like what if you'll have enough land for a burial or if the person who owns you quote unquote is like you can't bury your day. That's so insane. There's a lot to think.
About, no, I know. And it's like I want to know more about burial customs because I feel like I had this like picture of how slavery worked from my education.
And you know, the education I had was like not like I was saved, the nightmare of like education that was like and people were happier under slavery, Like I didn't get any of that right, But I had this kind of like one size fits all, like despotism, Like when I found out that a lot of enslaved people had money, it didn't it didn't work in my understanding.
We only sort of I think see it as in the way the films depicted it, which is often like child slavery, so like large, large, large usually cotton plantations. Yeah, and there's the see I think it's kind about the last time I was here. But there's those slave tit narratives, which I think no longer the official titles. I apologize
the Smithsonian owns them. And basically, in like nineteen thirties, a bunch of folks went around and they just recorded the voices of the formerly enslaved, most of whom were at this point in time, like were children when emancipation happened, and so they were sharing their stories and it was very interesting to hear, like people, how familial some of these relationships were, Yeah, intertwined in every capacity that you
could possibly think of. And yet still the amount of cruelty that can happen, especially if there's like two people live here who are not considered people there are five of us here, that's like insane dynamic to have to live through your whole life, and particularly you get into like the parent child relationships of it all. It's just ugh, yeah, it's all very messy.
No, it's so much messier than we I mean, the version that I grew up with wasn't a like rosy version, right, but it was not complicated by like the idea of like the first time I read about like how a guy who was owned had to go out and get a job and then give his wages to his to his owner.
Yeah, I'm just.
Like, man, it's so bad. I mean, it's like bad no matter what. But it's just like when they you're like, wow, we find like new ways to be fucked up whenever we look deeper into the past.
You know, Yeah, it's it's much more like emotionally sinister, I think, where when it's depicted as a business and largely impersonal, then you can sort of or at least I felt oftentimes we were just writing it off as being like, oh, well that's how things were, and Lincoln became president and we got rid of that thing. Like that was like essentially my educational for four three years slaves here. It was terrible. Most people hated it, but
what could we do? And then Lincoln like solve the problem. But it's like.
Okay, yeah, single handedly because he was a person. Oh yeah, So they had these burial societies and they had to be organized in a criminal fashion because it was criminal. Yeah, it was illegal in a lot of places, uh, for folks to gather in large groups without a white man present. So what they would do is amongst themselves, they'd pick one person who could read or write, so usually a house slave, and that person would set up with a ledger book and folks would come in and buy ones
or twos and slip money to the secretary. Sometimes they would just like come into church and sit down next to the secretary at church and be like, oh, you know, pass pass them a little money or whatever.
We do our weed deals in the alley outside of church.
Right, it's basically the weed dealing of Yeah, and each member who was written down in this ledger, which was like hidden you know, under the blanket at night of the you know, the secretary had to take this real seriously, right, Yeah. Each member of the society was known by a number instead of a name for secrecy. So you'd come that you sit down and be like, hello, I am number four or whatever.
How this okay? So the other thing I'm learning about a lot lately, not a lot. Let me slow down. I've been getting interested in numbers running, which essentially like just the lottery that they used to run on the side.
Wow, okay, yeah.
And like so like a lot of like entrepreneural black folks, and it sounds very similar ways would just be around in the neighborhood. They had a trusted system. You want to play it in the lottery, cool, slip us your money, totally fine, and then we just pay out winners and the rest goes into like funding the next one and
like super community based and like fun. And it's technically illegal because it's the but you know, and that's exactly why all of a sudden, and this is like pre are official gaming code, but they got real intense about being like you may not run numbers in your neighborhood, creat but it sounds like a lot of the same systems that were implemented here maybe got used for numbers games later, which is really fascinating.
That wouldn't surprise me. And so these these burial societies developed, a lot of them developed into mutual aid societies. A lot of these places were providing you with your clothes and your shelter and the necessities of life. So basically a system of like like people you know, later white socialists are cribbing the like, from each according to ability, to each according to need. You know, I don't know
there's a direct lineage. I'm not sure who was looking over whose shoulder, but certainly this came before that particular quote, which wasn't Marx, but I can't remember who it was off the top of my head. Whatever. I looked into it because for a while I was going to get giant block letter according to ability according to need tattooed on my arms because I'm a nerd.
Listen, Okay, where does that mean things should be on your body? I know that's a good one, but also I understand or somebody'd be like, oh gosh, that was a lot yeah energy behind that one statement.
For me, and I'm like, I'm not a Marxist and it's like mostly associated with him and they, you know, but I really care about that sentiment.
You know, it's a good one. Yeah.
So mutual aid society started with how do we afford to get buried and end up building hospitals and shit. Secret societies started building or orphanages and other charitable organizations. I think more of this is happening in the North, but I'm not. I had a hard time parsing out exactly, and this is the soil that later cooperative businesses and banks grew out of. One study showed that out of two hundred and thirty six of these societies, I think
this is the South. I think this is Maryland, which was the South at the time of two hundred and thirty six of these societies, seventy nine were operated out of churches, and ninety two were built out of secret societies. Wow. Yeah, And so that leads to a lot of other ones that were entirely informal. As far as I can tell, some of this.
Stuff is like, man, when you went in history, a lot of times, I just feel like you get struggled. That would be like, of course, obviously, like why did I not Why wasn't I consciously thinking about this before? Right, They wouldn't let black people participate in regular society, like of course they had to have like all these underground, yeah, organized systems in order to like how are we like banking with our money? How are we getting around? Like
it's yeah, it's kind of fat. It also is giving me new insight into black people's obsession with secret societies. Yeah. About in a an analytical sense, someone was like, okay, Luminati, da da da da. But now, oh, we were everywhere constantly being secret of course, Okay, sure, and I get why we're currently to this day still obsessed with the idea of secret societies running things. That's really funny.
Well, and it's like secret societies one of the things that I'm obsessed with how power forms and shapes. I grew up thinking like, oh, the state that is the source of all power, right, And then you're like, oh, no, wonder the state hates gangs, right, because gangs are, for better or worse, another way of organizing power within a community. One hundred right, And still were cops. Although they're associated with the state, they're often independent from the state in
very terrifying ways. And then I realized that all I mean, the state is basically just the biggest gang is taken over, right, And so secret societ and all of these like decentralized attempts at centralizing power, you know, are really fascinating to me. And they were way way bigger of a deal back in the day. We no longer think about them in the same way. And I think, and I'm a little
bit off my own total knowledge train here. I think that the rise of the nation state, which is a fairly modern concept just the past couple hundred years, I think that that's a big part of it. But to these mutual lated societies, there were not two hundred and thirty six of them total. These are the examples two hundred and thirty six that were cataloged by I think to boys. Philly alone had one hundred of them in the eighteen thirties. Baltimore had thirty at around the same time.
The first ones, especially the secret societies, I think they started off for men. Only by the seventeen nineties women had their own, and soon they were essentially running all this shit. A lot of their ones started off like all women, right, and then slowly I think people were like, your's is better, Can I join yours?
I'm sure. I think what often frequently happens too is women are left with young boys who are sort of in that middle age, not white men, not you know, young enough to just be with the children. And I think frequently, you know, we see that they're going to force so ino spaces to be like, I guess everyone get it. We're just taking care of everybody, Like just what else can we do?
That makes sense. Yeah, and so we're to skip ahead just so I have just other numbers to play with. By eighteen ninety eight in New York City, fifty two percent of all Black women in New York City we're in organizers of these mutual aid like we're involved in organizing these Well, fifteen percent of black men were involved in mutual aid societies.
Can come on, women, show them what's up.
Yeah, So you've got the roots of cooperativism coming up through mutual aid societies. But importantly, du Bois and others track the origin of all this into the history of black insurrection and that these can't be separated so completely. Fundamentally, we shouldn't be enslaved anymore. Is an economic proposition, right, because you're attempting to change the economic relationship between you and the people who have real funny ideas about who's
in charge one percent. So in this sociological study full of charts and graphs, du Bois spends an awful lot of time talking about the underground railroad and tying it
into all of this cooperative economic stuff. The underground railroad, of course, is the thing that's famous for how white people use it to try and feel better about being white, because besides John Brown, it's like the only place that those those of us who are white can look for role models is like a couple Quakers, John Brown and the Underground Railroad, Right, they.
Be clinging to them. They're like, no, the Quakers are really out here just constantly helping black people. You know, a handful of them.
Some of them.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely do boys.
Just a fucking wrecking ball through white myths. As always. I've decided he's the kool aid Man of sociology.
Yeah, someone make a gift, someone animated.
Yeah. He comes in pointing out that the Underground Railroad was the result of black organization. By eighteen fifty, a fucking hundred thousand people had made their way to freedom by way of this organization over the course of about twenty years. Yes, and that's, by my really rough and improper math, that's about one in every forty slaves, because there were about four million people enslaved in this country at emancipation fifteen years later.
Wow.
I always figure I'll do a whole series about it one of these days, because it's one of the only genuinely cool things that I learned about in school, you know, and it as far as I can tell. I know, I keep using these like superlative statements in this particular series, but I'm holding to all of them. I think that the Underground Railroad is one of the greatest achievements of human liberty and history.
It absolutely is it absolutely Okay, Okay, two books don't to recommend again. I maybe recommended them last time, so I apologize it said, well, definitely one maybe not. The other Wake The Hidden History of Women Led Slave Revolts.
Oh, I have that one because you recommended it.
Yeah, yeah, So it's a graphic novel. It's beautifully illustrated. This woman is a historian. She's got her doctor in history, and her specialty is going in and trying to read between the lines to find missing history because oftentimes, you know, in sleave, people's names were written down ages. There's so much missing from historical documents. She's really good at uncovering
that kind of stuff. The other one is called Brooding Over Bloody Revenge, which chronicles the enslaved people who killed their masters. And what I found really interesting in the book is the historian who worked on this she only focused on stories where people confess and where she was reasonably sure that they had actually committed the murders as
opposed to just being accused. And I say all this to say it was really interesting in reading these books and getting deep into slaver You know, I grew up in and it says that was like slaves tried to run away, period, But the idea of fighting back and
organizing was not introduced in my education at all. Right, And I think what makes the Underground a side room its obvious success in freeing people, which is brilliant and amazing and such an intensely coordinated organization that's really beautiful is it's one of the few bold pieces of history that everyone can look at and see and be like, No, like enslaved people were not only brilliant, but like capable, Like it brings a level I think of humanity that's
often missing, Like so many people I think are a shame to come from, like enslaved people, Like there's a really deep shame or human or there's a lot of frustration with the way those stories have been told for a myriad of reasons, and I think many are valid, but my gosh, I mean, I just don't think how you can look at something like the underground railroad, knowing the amount of oppression people were under, and not be like, Wow, it's really fucking cool I descended from folks were able
to accomplish this, Like it's really amazing.
I'd be so fucking proud, because like, yeah, because like we always get shown enslaved people as either acquiescing to suffering or like sometimes nobly which is the worst of all, or when they try to rebel or run away, it's like impotently, right, there's always the scene of and I it's like worth pointing out that slave Catcher was a police comes from and a lot of people got it real bad because they tried to get the fuck out, you know, but like a lot of people fucking succeeded.
It's not like these like oh, well, you know, I mean that one guy, like oh yeah, that those one hundred thousand yeah one people, cities.
And communities and legacies of families. Yeah. Have you seen Barry Jenkins underground yet?
I don't think so?
It is? Okay, So it's a fictionalized story that actually sort of envisions the underground real world as like a train that ran underground. Oh yeah, yeah, uh huh, The cinematography is gorgeous, but it's one of for me, for my money anyway, the best humanizing of the enslaved experience. Right, Like, So you have a girl who's she's she's fucking pissed,
so angry at everybody she can't till down. And she also the racist ideals have been so ingrained within her that the underground rower journey for her is like unlearning all of this hate that's been taught to her, learning what does safety in America actually look like? She lands in towns that are like small spoiler, but the first time she lands in, when she gets out, they're secretly sterilizing everybody. So yeah, free, but all of you are
getting sterilized. Yeah, what can we do? And so she's going to these retalispy and it's so man, it's a really beautiful story. I I it's hard watched, extremely hard watched, but I'm so well told.
So this whole thing is built from black work with solidarity, real solidarity, the kind of solidarity that involves risk from white abolitionists, but even more risk from black people. More than five hundred people a year who'd already escaped North went back to the fucking South to spread the word and rescue more people the balls, Like I know that's I know. I'd like to imagine that that would be me. I don't know, you know, I.
Feel fairy confident it wouldn't I would love to imagine, Like yes, And then I went back my life's bread were but like man getting to a space that actually just feels safe, or you have to like stress for once in your life.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, But if you don't want to stress in your life, you can come with us to the magical land of advertising. Here we go and we're back. What I keep reading about over and over in this particular research is that the overall vibe of free black people in both the North and the South wasn't I've got mind fuck you, but a real intense involvement in the betterment of lives of other black people. Free black people were often the central organizers of mutual aid societies
or would contribute disproportionately to them, including like in the South. Right, they would also risk their lives and I believe the freedom working on the underground railroad, one black man in Ohio would lead people in a closed carriage through racist neighborhoods. A one porter turned the metaphorical railroad into a literal one. He was a porter of a sleeping car that ran
through Illinois, WI people in the sleeping car. Du Bois tells the story about a black man in Ohio who would go to the Virginia border, pretending to be a drunk so that white people would ignore him, and then tell enslaved folks exactly how to run away in great detail with all the information they needed.
People are so awesome. Oh my god, I know, so fucking cool.
This guy's name isn't even in this book that I read, right, Yeah, he did more for the world than almost anyone alive today. Yeah.
Yeah, not many people measuring up to this. Dude's like, what a brave act, what a brilliant way of like escaping detection and also spreading the word like ingenious. Yeah.
And if you're thinking to yourself, waite, Ohio doesn't touch Virginia. This is before West Virginia seceeded from Virginia over its lack of interest in dying for slavery. I always have to shout out. I feel like once an episode I have to point out that West Virginia seceded from Virginia to anyway whatever. I live in the Greater Virginia. The one Another Conductor was a prominent black business owner in Detroit.
His name was William Lambert. He operated his businesses as safe houses and apparently helped thirty thousand people escape to Canada over the course of thirty two years. That is three people a day. That shit adds up. Wow, I'm once again I do very rough math on this show. At one point, this fucking scumbag slaver showed up chasing
a guy. So William Lambert, he's like a kind of important person economically into so he puts pressure on the city into arresting the slaver on completely bullshit charges that he knows won't stick, just to get the guy in jail long enough for the runaway to get the fuck away to Canada use the.
System against them. That's so cool. Oh my gosh, I love that.
And the response to this was pretty wild. It is almost certainly what helped lead to the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty, which helped protect the rights of slavers in the North while they were like off chasing their property. But whether you can control the backlash.
You know, I know they were gagged. They that said systems coming for me. No, I am a white man.
What the hell they get confused fast? I am my property escaped. It's even though it's capable of docking and whatever. And this underground railroad there was no central leadership, there was no central committee. It was organized, but what you buy what you might call affinity groups and even just own individuals. So the railroad is an international horizontal criminal association built out of mutual aid, free association, cross race solidarity.
Like it's just like all the things I like, you know, Yeah, It's also where John Brown looked to find the people with which with whom to conspire, and then you know, sparked the war that ended slavery, which he fucking did. And I am still mad at people trying to pretend like John Brown fucking failed. He fucking won. He just
died in the process. Imagine for a moment, believing in Christianity and thinking I have to survive is a prerequisite to winning, like right is sacrificing yourself to get killed by the state is the entire focal point of this religion.
Right right? Yeah, that a real one. Uh An absolute fee on the ground I will stand in my truth kind of fella. Yeah, I'm an impressive dude.
Yeah, And like, as always, it's a little bit an issue that we pay a lot more attention to him than we pay two black people who did the overwhelming majority of the work. But like it's still cool, Like that's not his fault, you know.
It's absolutely not his fault. And in fact, without him does the war, you know what I mean. Like otherwise it's just oh, black people, who I forget, what's the fake disease they made up for why slaves run away?
Oh my god, I forgot this. I don't remember the name.
I can't recall it. Either it's very dumb, or they're like, oh, they're running away because they have this disease that needs to be cured, and so with that you can easily explain away anything they're doing. And it takes a dude who looks like the guy's in power to be like, actually, this is effing bullshit and I'm not gonna stand for it sometimes for them to pay attention.
Yeah, a lot of the railroad ran through Appalachia because Appalachi is really culturally distinct from the rest of the South, and because it's remote and rugged, people would hide in the limestone caves and stuff. And it is not a coincidence that John Brown did his thing here. People talk a lot about the conductors of the railroad, and I like them. It's good and worthwhile to talk about them.
But there were also, and I'm making this term up, there were enforcers for the underground Railroad after the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it easier for set you know, Southern assholes to go and try and catch people. Right, John Brown and others who don't get named, Even though everyone else involved in this is black, their names are not recorded to the same prominence, or at least I didn't run across them started.
It happens.
The League of Gileadites Gileadites, which is a good name, even if I don't know how to pronounce it, because I am a lapsed Catholic and not a anyway, And this existed. This league existed to protect the people escaping from slavery, like with guns and bombs and s hell yeah, they went fucking hard. Anyone who snitched in their ranks was killed death.
Okay.
Their rules included should one of your number be arrested. You must collect together as quickly as possible so as to outnumber your adversaries Mario. And another rule was let no able bodied man appear on the ground unequipped or with his weapons exposed to view. So like, be smart, you got carrier gun fucking everywhere. Another one was make clean work with your enemies, and be sure you meddle,
not with others. Okay, so like vengeance for the people who need vengeance, but don't don't fuck with anyone.
Else, right, don't don't bring trouble to our door. That's unnecessary. Yeah.
Oh oh no, they're they're about trouble to doors. I'll talk about in a seconds, okay. Another one of their rules was stand by one another and your friends while a drop of blood remains, and be hanged if you must, But tell no tales out of school, make no confessions.
Okay, Okay, I love.
Pirate rules, I know, right. This is my favorite of their rules. After affecting a rescue, if you are assailed, go into the houses of your most prominent and influential white friends with your wives, and that will effectually fasten upon them the suspicion of being connected with you, and will compel them to make a common cause with you.
Bring your friends kicking and screaming, We do not care. That's amazing.
If you're fucked with, go to a white friend, not because the white friend will save you, but because this will force the white friend to get off the fucking fence.
Yeah. I we have to put in a position where they have to say something.
Yeah.
Wow. I love these systems of organization, especially as I look more into violent resistance. You know, these are actions that move needles. As unfortunate as it is that these things inevitably happen. Yeah, people don't listen.
I mean, it's just self defense and community defense.
You know.
They also distributed instructions about how to disrupt courtrooms with quote freely burning gunpowder. I think this isn't like bombs. I think this is like a flash, you know, right to help prisoners escape. If anyone knows about a book about these people, let me know. This is like a side quest in my research. But I like, they're fucking They're cool. And what did the folks do when they
successfully made it to safety. Well a lot of them entered into cooperative societies like not like Beyond even like mutual aid stuff, like stuff that just straight up is like communes and you know what later would get called socialism and communism but usually democratic instead, and we'll talk about it. In the South, you had these maroon communities like we were talking about, and they're sort of informally and you know, set up, and they're often communal and cooperative.
I don't think they're universally. So in the North you had black intentional communities, and a lot of these were like not as cool as they could be. A lot of them were set up by white abolitionists in these like very paternalistic, annoying ways. The white abolitionists were like real spotty, you know, you.
Know, yeah, yeah, they're they're middle of the laying people would work within the system to defeat the system.
Yeah you know. And then a lot of the ones who said they were doing that were also like providing firearms to John Brown, right, but like you know, okay, So some of these societies that were set up were for profit farmers working collectively owned fields. So it was like not for profit for a boss, it was like for profit for all of the workers collectively, and which is what worker cooperativism is. Just before anyone was calling things that the most successful these and I think the
most numerous were in Canada. A lot of people were like, look, the North isn't far enough going out, Yeah, but there were some in the US. Two. The Wilberforce Colony in Canada built its own schools that were so good that the neighboring white folks sent their kids to it too.
Mother of god. Yeah, can you imagine how what was the education life? Yeah? Must have been in sensational Wow.
Well we talk about that. We did this episode about the black origin of EMTs and ambulance service in Pittsburgh and like, way more recently than you'd think. I think it's the seventies.
Oh wow.
And it served the black community and came out of the black community. And then all these white neighborhoods were like, wait, we want the empts to come here. We don't care that they're black. Could we just not die that neighborhood? People don't die when they get sick or od or whatever? You know. Wow, Although then other people were like, no, I would rather die than let this black paramedic touch me or whatever, which I'm like, good, then die, I mean,
and take care of people. It's not like your terms are acceptable.
They cannot waste their time, and you can die. It'll be great. Yeah.
Some of these communes, not the EMTs, it's one hundred years later. Some of these communes were set up by white people in weird and condescending ways. In Tennessee, there's this white lady. She's an early suffragist, and she's like, I've got a plan. All right, let's hear her plan.
She's going to buy hundreds of acres in Tennessee and then buy like a hundred enslave people and don't set them free right away, but but build a commune where they collectively labor and profit and then buy their freedom, whereupon they can go and colonize Africa.
And did you just double slavery?
Yeah, a little bit.
She said, I bought you. It's not much better. H you can maybe buy your freedom based off prices that I decide.
I think it's the Yeah, I think it's what she paid for them, and she's not profiting off of them. They are like she's wildly misguided, but she's like she's not trying to Oh, I'm going to make a buck here too, Okay. But she's like she's like, oh, you will collectively work on this land that I'm going to set up for you all. But it's super fucking patronizing
and it didn't work out. Instead, it became this like weird integrated community that was harassed by local racists, but itself was too racist because black people weren't allowed to hold positions of authority because they hadn't been like properly educated enough to learn how to let people tell people what to do or whatever. So exhausting, I know, in the end it fell apart, and so she sent all the people that she owned a Haiti to be free.
You know what, girl, at the end there you pulled it out. You did it? She said, where were they able to get themselves free? Haiti? Do y'all want to go there?
Yeah?
That's amazing.
She genuinely was trying to do right, and in the end died right and along the way had some fucking wacky ideas and you know what.
Bless a wealthy white woman doing her psyche. Yeah, it was trying. Yeah, oh my god.
Then there was the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. And this is actually way cooler, and that you just sort of it sounds pretty forgettable, right, This is a whole different kind of cooperative, utopian commune. It is racially integrated from the start and intentionally, and white black people were as much leaders of the community as white people. So journal Truth, one of the most famous abolitionists, and David Ruggles, one of the lead organizers of the railroad,
both lived there for a while. And this is actually where sojournal Truth got radicalized. As far as I can tell, Hell yeah, and the whole thing sounds like a weird sci fi novel cult because hear me out, but not a bad way. It's no weird way. They are radically egalitarian. That's like their whole thing. And they their profit thing that they try to do is that they operate a silk mill because they have decided and I do not
know why the silkworm is a symbol of democracy. It must have been the style at the time.
They don't work together though, it's just one Yeah, it's fine. It worked for them.
Yeah, And so they have this like silkworm commune where they're like, the silkworm is the best. And then while they lived there, they were secretly part of a secret militant society that liberated enslave people. I would read a Ya novel set in the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, You.
Can Eat Beautiful Silks and also radical revolution, Let's go already.
Frederick Douglas visited all the time and he wrote about it, quote, the place and the people struck me as the most democratic I have ever met. It was a place to extinguish aristocratic pretensions. There was no high, no low, no masters, no servants, no white, and no black. And he referred to it as the only place he'd ever been in the US where his skin color wasn't used against him. Wow.
Sojourner Truth was elected the head of the communities like laundry and oversaw the white coworkers who had elected her into this position. And this was fucking mind blowing to the people who've learned about it.
I can only imagine it like you'll have a black lady.
Boss like yeah, and they're like, oh, we picked her.
Yeah, Oh that bar too her two. Yeah, we like her.
She's a great leader, and I think she gets paid the same.
Wow.
The place only lasted a few years, I want to say, four four and a half years or something like that. Most of the storians say it fell apart because the silk mill couldn't turn a profit, Sojourner Truth said that individualism got in the way and that people like were I suspect it's both. You know, probably most of the US communes were the paternalistic things set up by white people. But there is a standout exception. One of the coolest
things I've ever heard heard about there is. And I read about cool things for a living, and a lot of the coolest things I find are like footnotes or I get a paragraph about it where I'm like I
would read a boring PhD dissertation on this. The Combahi River colony on the South Carolina and Georgia coast Basically, when a bunch of black men from the South went to go join the Union army, hundreds of black women, mostly the wives of those Union soldiers, went over and squatted unused farmland and grew food and took care of each other and had a all women like workers cooperative mutual aid society in the middle of a war.
Wow.
To quote author Jessica Gordon Nemhart, they refused to work for whites and were proud of their handicrafts and cotton crop as well as their independence. And that's like all I know about them. I've now told you everything I know about them.
I'm thirsty for more. I know, were you Because here's the thing. If they're in the field, like if they're not working for white folks, there's a war going on, they're doing more than like sewing uniforms, Like who are they are they fixing like guns and stuff? Are they helping with like military operations like planning and stuff.
I think that they're pretty separatist. I don't I don't get the impression that they are like specifically like there to contribute to the war effort. Okay, although I mean they're certainly each one of them doing that is one less worker in the Confederate economics, right right, you know. But no, I think that they were like because the South, for some strange reason, black people on the South had really mixed feelings about the Union Army, right like, And
I only I know a bit about this. I did an episode right at the beginning of the show called the Civil War within the Civil War, and it was about the South's Civil War, in which both white and black people fought tooth and nail against the Confederacy and set up like seceded several different places, and there was a lot of people who worked for the Union Army
as like basically guerrilla soldiers and like irregulars. But like the North formed a beachhead on this one coastal town in the South that I totally forget the name of because this is two years ago that I did this research, and they like went around and were trying to recruit black people to join the Union Army, and a lot of them were like, you gotta pay us, You're going to give us the same uniforms, and they're all like, oh, maybe, and they're like no, we're good.
Yeah. I think there's like some leftover resentment from the Revolutionary because there was like a lot of thoughts in the Revolutionary War, if you fight, was it the French who were offering freedom the British is a British, right, Yeah, And they did it, Yeah, they did it. And then there were people who fought on the American side expecting to get the same situation and they did not. And I think there's a lot of like yeah, full Grandpappy ones, not gonna.
Get me sort of no totally and like they're not totally wrong. I mean a fuck ton of people did come from the South and then fight for the North and including at that beachhead. They eventually worked it out and there was like they're like yah whatever anyway, So
eventually the Civil War ended, the good guys win. Well, the the better than whatever we talk, you know, And the history of Black America in a lot of ways is the history of literally four million people winning their freedom and then being dropped into capitalist society, which famously doesn't really offer a lot to people who have nothing. But folks didn't have nothing. They had each other, they had two centuries of resistance culture, and they had these ads.
Oh god, that's the worst one I've ever done. I'm so sorry.
I really they got me, Margaret. I liked it.
Okay, thanks, thanks, because there's ads now speaking of capitalism. Here we go.
And we're back.
After black people won their freedom by throwing the biggest general strike the US has ever seen and the largest transfer of labor power from one army to another. And when I say this, I don't mean to discount the bravery and sacrifice of union soldiers white and black like, but you know, there are usually talked about. So I talk about the workers a lot to folks set about
in earnest building economic power. They did it overall by working together, all while fighting really really active resistance from white supremacy on both systemic and individual levels. And this is not to discount the work of the reconstruction. I actually think that the attempts at reconstruction were one of the more interesting like social programs the United States is
ever trying to run. And it just it was being run by an occupying army, and that had anyway whatever, I'm not that's not enough of my script for me to feel certain about. But what I do know is that in an eighteen sixty nine report from the Freedman's Bureau, this one kind of shocked me, honestly. This eighteen sixty nine reported that out of the four million people freed from slavery, about one and two hundred of these people
became quote an object of public charity. So only one in two hundred people.
Oh needed charity.
It became relying on charity after being dropped into a capitalist healthscape from a much worse healthscape.
That is inspiring.
And the report is basically saying, like, holy shit, how did this happen? You know?
Yeah?
And I think that there's some like I read that chunk like several highs because I'm it's still whatever. I think that there's like maybe ways that people are defining certain things. But overall, the people writing this report from the Freedman's Bureau are shocked by how little support people are reliant on from the federal government. It wasn't that people didn't need or get help, It's that they figured out how to help one another, as they've been doing forever.
Is the conjecture that I am working with this part blows my brain enough that I'm a little bit like really really du boys, am I reading you wrong? Like I don't know, you know whatever? It's fucking great and like land reform was promised at the beginning of the Civil War, which land reform did not happen. This is where you break up the big parcels of owned by old plantation owners and distribute it to the small farmers. This is the stuff that has led to leftist revolutions
all around the world for hundreds of years. Basically the breaking up of these like land monopolies. So instead of making farmers, the government made laborers. So an awful lot of these laborers worked together to become cooperative owners instead. And they did this in a lot of ways. One of the simplest was they pulled their money and they bought land together. One merchant described ten black men who came in and collectively bought seven hundred acres in cash.
Oh, I know that felt good.
I know, I know, like my family's been here for two hundred years. I'm fucking getting this.
You know this is my piece? Okay.
Yeah, Another time, one hundred and sixty folks elected themselves their own superintendent and then worked about one thousand acres together and formed a joint stock company.
Wow.
And joint stock companies were a big part of this black economic boom. The modern model of cooperative businesses were developed in Europe years later, and then these were these European practices were adopted by the black cooperative movement as best as I can tell in the US. But they started doing it anyway way before that, by using the tools that were legally available to them, like the joint stock company. And I wasn't able to figure out what
percentage of this was collectively managed. But I want to talk about black landownership, Okay. By eighteen seventy five, three million acres were owned by black farmers by nineteen hundred, this was twelve million acres. Wow, the total. And this is you're still only talking about like less than one percent or something like that, maybe up to three percent. I can't remember. I didn't write the percent numbers in
my script because I'm a fool. The landownership by black people in the United States probably peaked in nineteen ten at sixteen million acres across the US. These days, and at least farmland, it is down to two point nine million acres.
Wow.
There are groups like this is what I thought I was going to be focusing on, because this is what
I knew about through some of my other work. There's a group that was formed in the sixties, the nineteen sixties that's called the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and it exists to fight to keep farmland and black cooperatively owned hands, because that is an institution that people were fighting for and defending because it had been around and then had a spike in the sixties in the black cooperative movement, which I know way less about, because again, that's what
I thought i'd be talking about today, but instead I'm talking about one hundred years earlier.
Man, that's again, I just had no clue that any of this was taking place. And it's also got to be thinking like, man, I wish we could, I wish documentation was better, but the organizing on plantations must have
just been like at the next level. Right to be able to come out of slavery and immediately enact this so that only a couple hundred people are affected, and then on top of that, to find all of this space or growth in land ownership and then continuing to work to partnerships like that are not easy, you know, like only land together and farming or do this equipment we're sell it, And it's just like that's just so
much effort and work together. And the fact that they were able to build the stuff up is blowing my mind a little bit.
But you know, I mean they're all lazy and good for nothing.
They didn't educate them, so they can't possibly know anything.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, like instead of like absolutely white socialists should have been looking over their shoulders earlier. Yeah, you know, black farmers also banded together to coordinate how to resist being forced to sell everything cheap, and they coordinated their market power between small farmers and they did this coordination through Black churches, and this pissed off the racists, who
then you know, would attack churches and whatever. And I've covered a lot about the did a whole bunch of episodes about KKK. The newly free black people in America were really poised to take America in a radically new direction, the direction of cooperation, because among them there was, to quote du Bois again, quote little of that great inequality of wealth distribution which marks modern life, and that quote nearly all of their economic effort tends towards true economic cooperation.
And just as folks are starting to try and sort this out, as black people are getting their fucking shit together during reconstruction, du Bois puts it out that black people quote emerged to a semblance of economic freedom, only to be met by the Black Codes and political revolution. The Black Codes are various laws that going back to colonial America, restrict the rights of even free black people, laws preventing owning property, or gathering for warship, or owning guns.
People love to forget about that part. All the first fucking gun laws in the US step prevent black people from voting or even reading and writing. Even frapp free Black people were often prevented from legally being allowed to be literate, all different in different places at different times.
Even the Northern States had the Black Codes, sometimes specifically to try and convince black people to go live elsewhere, because like a lot of like like New York had this had a bunch of black code laws, and it was like specifically being lang, well, we don't want you here, and we're not going to like enslave you, but we don't want you around the police.
Don't come here. Yeah, maybe free, but somewhere else.
Yeah. Most Northern states seem to have abolish the Black codes after the Civil War, obviously all kinds of new shit like redlining and stuff kicking right away. Don't get me wrong. Of course, after the Civil War, though, these codes exploded across the South, specifically so that Democrats could hold on to power now that a huge chunk of their population could suddenly vote. That was a huge part of why the South was like, fuck, if we free,
they're going to vote us out. You know. Meanwhile, as black people emigrated away from the South to get away from you know, their former owners and Black codes and the KKK and really any reason they wanted, they could leave for because they're bored. I'll away from Yeah. Relief societies were set up to help people move into new cities, including just as the examples that I ran across Indianapolis and Saint Louis. Also in Kansas, sixty thousand black refugees
from the South were helped by these societies. The financial help wasn't a lot. That society raised sixty eight thousand dollars, so it's like it's almost it's a dollar a person roughly, but that ain't nothing, especially when you spend it cooperatively, right, because a lot of the stuff that they're doing is like pulling their money to buy food in bulk and
like finding ways to live cheaper. You know. Anyway, in Tennessee you have the ex Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, And this one was around for a long ass time, well into the twentieth century. OHO it existed to lobby to get formally enslaved people pensions for the
work that they'd already done, which famously was unpaid. And there's a million reasons to be mad about slavery, but one of them is just like whenever you read the nuts and bolts of abolitionist movements, and shit, so many of the Protestant fucking slave owners and some of the white abolitionists are like, well, we need to teach people the importance of hard work and of paying off their debts.
So once we buy them their freedom, their former owners can be properly compensated, and then that person owes us the cost of freeing them, like.
Woo the mental gymnastics. I know. Like it's multiple things. One is, yes, we freed you, but we were right to enslave you in the first place. Yeah, we're right to do it. And now that you're free, you owe us money. That's a crazy fucking thing to say to a person. I hope people got slap silly, I know. And the other idea of like, I don't know, just
this this feeling of you must punish yourself into success. Right, if you're not born wealthy, then you owe this society or this culture something, and we need to know that it hurt you and that it was very difficult for you or were unhappy if you obtain any kind of level of comfort or happiness, like our society is weird.
No, no, that that's a really good point. And I just I think about to say that the person who is property owes money to the person that they did unpaid labor for to compensate for the property that was lost. And what it says, it says an awful lot about capitalism because people talk about capitalism like it's and I think this is because capitalism has presented itself this way, where it's the economy where people work for money and then spend that money. That is not capitalism. That's just
market economies, which is a much broader category. Capitalism is when capital the stuff and people that you own, is the primary thing that is utilized to generate wealth. Capitalism is literally other people working so that you can make a living off of them. And this was true most explicitly under slavery, but it's also true under what folks at the time. I'm not saying we should bring back the phrase wage slavery, but it is how socialist at the time, and a lot of free black people, at
least several that I read, I don't know. I cannot tell you how the average newly freed person felt about the phrase wage slavery, but a lot of them used it to say, like, you're still working for someone else's you're making money for someone else. That is your new job. Way better than chattel slavery. And I'm not advocating we bring back wage slavery as a way of describing capitalism.
But your point is heard and well taken. And i mean, look at the hoops they went through to be like, oh, service jobs, you don't have to pay those people. I don't even worry about that. Yeah, yeah, they play games. I think it's it's just very exhausting when you look back at fights for freedom and typically what you see are like these swift gains and then an immediate hammer of like, no, this progress terrifying to us, slow it down. It's like we should be fighting forever. It's so exhausting.
Yeah, the forces of reaction are a fuck like. And it's interesting too, is like this is a little bit my conjecture, But everything I've read about all this stuff, it's like the abolitionists. Part of the reason that they were like, oh, well, buy everyone's freedom, will gradually get rid of slavery. They thought it was the only way that they could get Some of them were like just weird Protestant work ethic motherfuckers, but a lot of them were like, well, this is the only way we can
come up with to free the slaves. Now, a lot of people were like, well, I can come up with another way. And they look over at Haiti and they're like, what if we get a bunch of guns and we shoot all the slave owners so we don't have any slave owners anymore. And what's funny is the South, they could have taken the like the plantation owners and shit, could have stayed rich as fuck and been paid for
to free all the people. That was an offer that was on the table repeatedly, you know, and they were like, no, fuck, you were holding onto slavery. And so finally eventually people were like, all right, what if we shoot you all?
We have to get pilot again. You're not listening. And it's interesting as we talk about capitalism and backlash now, like I been thinking a lot. I was a film and television critic before I started producing, and there was this surge like like Trump comes to office, right, and all of a sudden, people are like, well, we need women, and we need people of color, and we need them
visit put them in front. And then I think behind that in a smaller but but vocal move, it was like okay, well, also like center trans people like let's every like do everybody get out there and like be
in front. And it's been interesting in the past two years post pandemic, we're seeing all of these offers being taken off the table, Like I think if you're looking at your queer, trans, black, Indigenous, uh Latine Asian folks who were influencers specifically, like that's just an area I know well who were getting brand deals and writing opportunities and performance opportunities left right and center, especially as whatever months you fall under was coming up all of a sudden,
it's like, wow, my inbox is school and at least I'll get paid really well in this month to talk
about how this country is okay, cool, whatever. They're disappearing and then we're seeing it too and the number of queer shows that were canceled in the past year and a half, and then they're like a crazy lack of diversity just across the board the way these things come in ways, and you have to so brace yourself, particularly if you want to be a creative living in these spaces, to just be like, well, I guess these next ten years, the years just don't matter, and we'll go around to
make indie art. Yeah, totally, totally, like a Harry Belafonte in his career super high up during World War two era, like he flying high, make a lot of deals. Uh, we're getting close into like wartime. He's anti war. No one touches you, we don't want to talk to you, don't look at us, get out of here, da da da. And it's usually not until much later when these people are legends that were like, oh wow, they stood in
their truth. How cool was that? And just like I don't know the way Cable's just destroys in so many ways, but particularly creatively. It's a man would love to not live in this system.
I know. And the one thing that kind of gives me hope is that like twenty years ago, like I when I was talking about being anti capitalist, people did not know what to make of that, you know, And I feel like enough time has passed that like the shadow of like Cold War propaganda has like receded where people can be like, oh, you mean there's other forms of socialism and communism and like ways of being other
than become the USSR. And you're like, yes, that's what we've been trying to tell you all along and like it's cool, it's it's but yeah, no, it's this. But we're currently seeing the backlash, we're currently seeing a rise in fascism, and anyway, it's not a current events show. But to finish out that organization, the one fighting for pensions in Tennessee, Yes, they did that fight for decades.
They fought for twenty years for pensions. They finally gave up in nineteen sixteen, I think probably because d well most of the formerly enslaved people were dying by that point. You know. They did, however, keep going for another fifteen years as one of these mutual aid societies, and until nineteen thirty one, I think black unionism picked up. It was built less out of the white labor movement and
more out of these white mutual aid societies. Is the best that I can tell until you start getting industrial unionism and the early aughts where you start having these like consciously multi racial union I'm just talking about the industrial Workers of the World again, my favorite union from back then consciously organizing black doc workers in Philly, Mexican miners in the Southwest, Japanese immigrants in the Pacific Northwest,
European immigrants all together in one union. And because it was a horizontal union, it wasn't like white people at the top telling everyone what to do. You know, so until that point, until you start getting like the multiracial union organizing, and there were other multiracial union organized I am now completely out of my wheelhouse of stuff I know, well, only stuff I know the cliffs notes of. And that's not what this show is that Margaret knows the cliff notes.
It's Margaret takes some things she knows the cliff notes about and then reads like eight books I'm exaggerating, reads two books about them and twelve articles or whatever. Anyway, one of these days we'll talk about cooperative workplaces themselves that grew the ones that grew out of these efforts, and how they tied into and informed broader cooperative movements worldwide. But that's a story for another day, because it turns out the roots go really, really deep, and I like
the roots of stories. I like root vegetables, like potatoes.
They're delicious. That's and oh man, that was great. I can't wait to learn more about like what progresses out of these movements, and again, like bless you for the work you do like all this, Like you know, some of this history is hidden, some of it it just hasn't been covered as well as others. But it's it's refreshing to come here and learn so much about my history. I really like it.
Thanks. I feel very self conscious that I'm like, hey, let me tell you about some black history. But I like would feel a lot worse not I talk about radical history. If you're talking about radical history in the United States.
You gotta talk about black history in the United States. They go hand in hand. It's totally fine. I love it.
Cool. Well you had anything you want to plug here?
Uh no, not really? Come come see me on the instagrams if that's a thing that you do. I like. I like the stories feature. I don't know how much longer I'll be there is just Joelle Underscore Monique over on Instagram.
I was recently, I was I was talking to someone and I was like, I used to define success as the ability to eat food based on my creative work, and by that I am successful. Actually have been for a while because I used to live off of like nothing, so it was easier for me to do so. I lived in the cabin in the woods. But I've decided
recently my new standard of success. The next level I want to reach is where I can just delete my social media and not think that it's going to impact my ability to eat food.
Oh my gosh, what a joy it would be not to be chained to these things. I'm almost have Twitter out of my systems. I had a good Girls swoop chat on there that was dragging me back a lot. I have time limits set up on my social so I am not too I never hit a time limit on Twitter anymore. So I was like, Okay, that's a really weird nice We're steps away from being able to leat and move on. But now, of course. And I never signed on for TikTok, so I didn't get caught
into the algorithm chap, thank god. But man, Instagram, all my friends are there? What are we doing? What's happening to go for lunch? Is it tasty?
Well? See what I think I might do eventually. I mean, I guess a lot of people do this where they have like a personal Instagram, and I don't know, I don't know any slang.
The Instagram is the fake one, and then you have.
The okay and so thank you. I like think about having one that's just like, actually, I can use it like a normal person instead of like everything I do has to be thought about as realise of these things. And I think about how I'm like, I would like to keep Instagram, and I would like to delete Twitter because Twitter is just a nightmare discourse machine that makes everyone hate each other. But I'm about to release a novel. This is my segue into my plug. I'm very good
at MYLF, but I'm about to release a novel. And I thought to myself, like, I can't delete my largest platform before I released this book. But what book, you might ask. No one's asking me that I've been talking about at the end of every episode, but I'm still going to read another blurb for it. The Sapling Cage is kickstarting now and it Wow, it's doing great or
I don't know how it's doing. I'm recording this before the kids the kid starter goes life, but I hope it's doing great or I'd probably say that no matter what it looks like, honestly, because oh god, fuck my life.
Any manifesting greatness, Margaret, It's amazing, it's doing well, gangbusters.
Thank you, thank you, So what the author Nino sepri Offer of Finna had to say is The Sapling Cage is a compelling coming of age fantasy with impeccable vibes. Witches, knights, errant and monsters populate a rich story about a trans girl finding power and community. It's also a reminder that fantasy can be a vehicle for so much interrogations of power, knowledge, ethics, and an exploration of how to live in the world.
Hey, that's a good one too. I like that one. The first one was all like, oh, I should pagin it's big emotion. This one's like so compelling. Girls, you can be sitting and thinking about this one for a long time.
I hope so. And I'm really excited that people seem to be enjoying it, the people who have gone to read it so far. And you, dear listener, can enjoy it by going to Kickstarter and backing it, or waiting until it comes to a library and getting it from the library. But you can put in library request forms, or you can go to a chain bookstore and never mind, you can imagine what steal it. It's a joke about stealing it. I don't care if you steal my book
from a chain bookstore. That's what I'm flirting around. Anyway, I will see all of you next week. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.