#federation 50th

Seventh in a Series on the Federation of Southern Cooperatives

We all need “A Room of One’s Own” as Virginia Woolf wrote nearly a century ago—a place where we feel safe, can allow our creativity and imagination to flow freely, can feel empowered.

First edition cover (1929) by Vanessa Bell.

This is no less true of an organization as for an individual. And for a Black Empowerment organization in the Deep South in the 1970s, this was particularly true. Though it had an operational office in Atlanta since its inception, the Federation staff desired a more expansive space, more centrally located, and one in which it could hold trainings and carry out agricultural experiments on behalf of its largely rural and agricultural membership. As we shall see in future episodes, the locale the Federation chose may not have been ideal—what space in the rural South could have been ideal for such an organization at that time?—but it nonetheless held the promise of providing ample space to dream big. Here is another excerpt from my 50thAnniversary essay, “A Brief History of the Federation:1967-2017.”

The Federation’s Rural Training & Research Center in Epes, Alabama.

A Place to Call Home

The year 1971 was a turning point for the Federation. The start-up organization had been operating out of small office space in Atlanta since its inception in 1967, but always with an eye to find a rural-based headquarters to call home—preferably somewhere centrally located within the Deep South. Initially, Prejean inquired about the possibility of purchasing the Mount Beulah conference center where the idea for the Federation had been hatched. Unfortunately, its church-based owners had already accepted a long-term lease from another civil rights group, the Delta Ministry, and the center was then serving as the headquarters for an OEO-funded statewide Head Start program. Another potential Mississippi property in Okolona that Prejean pursued also fell through.

Then, the Panola Land Buying Association—a group of tenant farmers who had been evicted from the land they farmed for attempting to obtain their fair share of federal agricultural price supports—needed help in purchasing nearly 1,200 acres of land in the western Black Belt of Alabama, just across the border from Mississippi. The Federation’s Lewis Black, Albert Turner, and Thelma Craig spearheaded the three-year battle to purchase the land on the condition that, if successful, a portion of the land would be granted to the Federation for its headquarters. Because members of the White ruling class were loath to see property sold to Black people, particularly those they saw as threats to their power base, a long legal battle ensued, but the PLBA and the Federation ultimately prevailed in federal court and in 1971, the Federation opened its Rural Training and Education Center in Sumter County near the town of Epes, Alabama, on the banks of the Tombigbee River—a waterway that would become central to one of the Federation’s important victories a few years later.

Initially encompassing 375 acres, the Training Center provided a home base for the Federation’s expanding regional staff, all of whom were required to relocate and help build the new Training Center while continuing their programmatic work throughout the South. Wendell Paris, his brother George, and George’s wife Alice; John Zippert and his now-wife Carol Prejean Zippert; Jim Jones and others moved to Epes to become part of what Carol would call, “Our Garden of Eden in the Struggle.” The twelve families that moved onto the property each lived in trailers while the Training Center took shape. Contract laborers worked side-by-side with Federation staff members to build the needed housing and training facilities. The staff also chipped in a portion of their salaries (anywhere from 1% to 10%) to help fund the building project. The close living quarters of the dozen families helped create a close-knit community that endured many hardships to help breathe life into the Federation’s aspirations.

The Paris Family (l-r), Wendell, Alice, and her husband George. All once lived at the Federation’s Epes, Alabama Training Center. 

This indomitable team also created the outlines of what would become the Training Center’s calling card—agricultural demonstration projects—both livestock and vegetable crops. Small family farmers all over the South would visit the Training Center to learn how to more economically and efficiently plant and rotate their crops, manage their livestock, and generally become more productive. The Training Center would also eventually encompass a large conference center, complete with a kitchen and cafeteria; dormitory facilities to house up to 80 trainees; a business center to reproduce educational materials; and offices to accommodate the growing staff. It became the foundation stone of the Federation’s operations and remains so to this day.

Tenn-Tom Waterway—the Federation Flexes its Muscles

An advantage to having staff live in the community they were working for was their ability to stay alert to new developments.One of the Federation’s earliest big wins resulted from a federal dam project on a waterway that flowed right by its doors. Soon after the Federation’s staff relocated to the Training Center, the federal government announced a multi-billion-dollar, multi-year public works project that would create a series of locks, dams, and channels over a 234-mile course through Mississippi and Alabama to connect the Tennessee River with the Tombigbee River and the Port of Mobile. The new Tenn-Tom Waterway would create an alternate route for barge traffic to flow from the middle of the country to the Gulf of Mexico. Ostensibly, the project was an extension of the War on Poverty, but when President Nixon announced his plans to put $1 million in his 1971 budget proposal to initiate the project, many saw it as a political move to shore up his support in key Southern states. Nevertheless, after nearly a two-year delay, the project broke ground in December 1972.

Curiously, even with the federal government’s involvement, there seemed to be no set asides for minority participation in the project. Members of the Federation staff realized that the opportunity for jobs and job training for many of their members was passing them by, as the Army Corps of Engineers was importing labor from states as far away as Iowa and Indiana to work on the project, despite the fact that the waterway cut right through some of the most economically depressed areas of the country. In January 1974, the Federation convened a conference to discuss the matter at its Training Center site. From that meeting emerged the Minority Peoples Council on the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway, which would ultimately be successful in lobbying the federal government’s Corps of Engineers, Labor Department, and the Office of Federal Contracts Compliance, to create an affirmative action plan that led to the training and employment of hundreds of Black construction workers from the region to work on the project through its 1984 completion.

Wendell Paris standing on a bridge traversing the Tenn-Tom Waterway, a multi-billion federal project for which Paris, on behalf of the Federation, secured hundreds of jobs for local Blacks.

This was an incredible success for the Federation, still in its early growth years. The Federation’s Wendell Paris chaired the Minority Peoples Council, and his involvement in negotiating with government officials provided just the kind of credibility the Federation needed to convince local Black residents still on the fence about cooperatives that the Federation was bringing about significant positive economic change to the region.

Connecting the Dots – Civil Rights and Economic Justice

The Training Center also provided the Federation with a large space to hold mass meetings of its members. Since it became fully operational in 1972, the Federation has held every one of its annual meetings at its Epes Training Center, hosting an array of celebrities and politicians, some of whom had never stepped foot into America’s Black Belt before.

If any proof were needed to demonstrate that the Federation and economic justice were the next step in the long civil rights movement, one need only look at the speakers the Federation invited to its annual meetings in the early days of its development. At its first meeting in March 1968, only months after the Federation was formally incorporated (August 1967), Charles Prejean himself served as the primary speaker. Once the Federation found its footing, such civil rights icons as Mississippi’s Fannie Lou Hamer, the SCLC’s Ralph David Abernathy, and Georgia state senator and former SNCC Communications Director Julian Bond provided the keynote addresses for the years 1969, 1970, and 1971, respectively. All of these luminaries understood that the work of economically empowering low-income minority farmers was essential to the political empowerment that each had dedicated their lives to. Their star power helped give credibility to the Federation’s efforts and drew even more cooperatives into the Federation’s orbit.

Then-Georgia State Representative Julian Bond was the featured speaker at the Federation’s third annual meeting in 1971. Pictured from left to right are Federation Board members Gonze Twitty (SC) and Woodrow Keown (AR); Executive Director Charles Prejean; Julian Bond; and Board President Arthur Harris (TN). 

For its 1972 annual meeting, the Federation invited as its keynote speaker the recently elected African-American Congressman Parren Mitchell of Maryland, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus and brother to the NAACP’s legendary lobbyist Clarence Mitchell, Jr. The following year, the Reverend Jesse Jackson filled the keynote slot. More than any other social justice organization operating out of the South at that time, the Federation had the foresight to connect its struggle for economic justice for some of America’s poorest rural citizens with those fighting for the same principles for the country’s urban poor.

By the mid-1970s, the Federation was serving more than 130 co-ops in 14 states, with most consolidated in the Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. In addition, the concept of state associations, also part of the incorporators’ vision, began taking shape in many of these states. (Today, the Federation’s member state associations continue to operate in AL, GA, FL, MS, and SC.) The Federation saw its role as a regional coordinator of its members’ interests, particularly at the federal level. The Federation could help attract federal monies and monitor federal legislation and lobby for advantageous provisions for low-income minority farmers with the federal government. The role of the state associations was to discern the needs of cooperatives and co-op members in their respective states and to lobby for assistance to meet those needs with the Federation and with public and private funding sources at the state level. Their role involved spearheading state legislative initiatives and lobbying for legislation at the state level that would, if not an advantage to their member cooperatives, at least put them on a level playing field with the larger farms and agribusinesses that were beginning to dominate the rural landscape. The state associations also provided the needed local link that the geographically dispersed Federation might have found hard to achieve otherwise. Member co-ops were required to join both their state association and the Federation. State elections were held annually to select a statewide representative to serve on the Federation’s board of directors.

NEXT:  More about the Panola Land Buying Association, its deep roots in the 1960s civil rights movement, and its unlikely success in securing land and a future for its residents as well as for the Federation.

Previous Blogs on The Federation and its 50 Years of Courage, Cooperation, Commitment & Community:

#1. http://blog.notbemoved.com/post/167100925831/lighting-a-candle-instead-of-cursing-the-darkness

#2. http://blog.notbemoved.com/post/167392921041/the-start-of-the-southern-black-cooperative

#3. http://blog.notbemoved.com/post/167664317156/congressman-john-lewis-ga-offers-tribute-to-the

#4. http://blog.notbemoved.com/post/169972785176/carol-prejean-zippert-the-creative-voice-of-the

#5. http://blog.notbemoved.com/post/170841167581/the-great-society-helps-to-jump-start-the

 Sixth in a series about the Federation of Southern Cooperatives

When the group of 22 individuals signed on to the new Federation’s Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws in 1967, their first official act was to choose a leader. Charles Prejean, was an obvious choice. Because of his growing role in cooperative development in Louisiana, Charles Prejean had been invited to be present both at the Mt. Beulah meeting and at the birth of the Federation in Atlanta. Others who would become dynamos of the Southern Cooperative Movement were also in attendance, including John Zippert, Prejean’s sister Carol, Estelle Witherspoon, G. L. (Gonze) Twitty, and Lewis Black.

Charles Prejean in the 1970s, explaining the mission and purpose of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

Charles Prejean became an original signatory to the Articles of Incorporation and despite his relative youth—he was only 26 years old at time of the Federation’s formation—he was chosen by the other signatories to serve as the president of the newly formed Board of Directors. It was a prescient choice. Prejean would lead the organization—first as President, then as Executive Director—through its formative and spectacular growth years, as well as through some of its most difficult days. For the next 17 years, Prejean would be at the helm, securing federal grants from the OEO and other federal agencies, attracting substantive funding from leading foundations, and inviting churches and other charitable organizations to help aid the Federation’s social welfare mission.

The Federation’s Mission and Purpose

When Prejean and others drafted the Federations Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws, they spent a substantial time determining the newly forming organization’s purpose statement, what we would now call its mission. The 34 long lines of text—presented as a single sentence—provide a short course in cooperative development. Some excerpts follow.

The purpose for which the Federation is organized are:

for primary and mutual benefit of patrons of the association as ultimate consumers;

to promote region-wide programs and institutions for the training of persons interested in the formation and development of all types of cooperatives;

to act as a clearing house and data bank of information relating to the different types of cooperatives;

to make technical and financial resources available to existing cooperatives and to persons wishing to organize a cooperative or association of cooperatives; 

to aid cooperatives in ascertaining alternative means of supply and distribution;

to engage in research relevant to economic development or cooperative expansion;

to serve as a clearing house for potential resources, financial assistance and technical help for cooperatives;

to promote the organization of state associations of cooperatives;

to assist, defend and protect the cooperative movement;

to engage in any activity in connection with the marketing or selling of agricultural or manufactured products of its members;

to finance by loan, grant or purchase any of the aforementioned activities.

 Clearly the drafters were thinking big, expecting their small group of originating cooperatives to expand in scope while also assuming that the concept of agricultural and handicraft cooperatives and credit unions would catch on as a way for low-income farmers and rural people to create their own institutions, improve their economic situations, and provide meaningful employment for themselves and their communities. It was a revolutionary concept that shattered the stereotype of the shiftless Southern Black agricultural worker who needed an overseer to ensure that any work got done. Here, those very people were taking their destinies into their own hands, working cooperatively for a better future, and inspiring others to do the same.

A caucus of members meet to discuss policy direction for their cooperative at a Federation annual meeting in the 1970s.

The incorporators’ grand vision paid off. In 1968, OEO came through with its first grant of nearly $600,000. “That really was the take-off point for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives,” Prejean would later say. Within a year, the Federation’s membership base had more than doubled, with 45 member-cooperatives, serving about 10,000 low-income families. By the end of 1971, that number had jumped to 110 cooperative members—exactly five times the number of initial incorporators—serving approximately 30,000 families.

A Funding Source to Support Struggling Co-ops

One issue that Prejean identified early in his tenure was the fact that much of the federal and foundation funding was directed for specific initiatives or earmarked for only certain types of cooperative development support, like providing technical advice or training. There were no funds to assist financially struggling cooperatives meet their bottom lines. “The response to the Federation has been great,” he wrote to Leslie Dunbar, former head of the Southern Regional Council who was by now running the Field Foundation, “but I am beginning to become frustrated because we have resources to help with so few of the problems of cooperatives.”

The logo of Southern Regional Council–a 1940s civil rights organization that helped organize the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

The solution was to create a revolving funding mechanism that would enable co-ops to get grants or loans directly from their own institution rather than having to attempt to obtain loans from banks or other established financial institutions unlikely to loan funds to an organization run by low-income people. In January 1969, the OEO provided a $500,000 grant to the Federation to establish the fund, which became the Southern Cooperative Development Fund (SCDF). At Prejean’s recommendation, the Federation board recruited Father McKnight to become the director of the new entity. The Federation had authority to appoint a majority of the board members to oversee the fund’s operations. Within a few years, SCDF had made loans totaling almost $3 million to Federation member-cooperatives for various operational improvements. Additionally, thanks to grants from the federal government and various foundations, SCDF’s assets had grown to nearly $8 million Thus, SCDF became the financier of the burgeoning Southern cooperative movement, while the Federation provided on-site consulting services as well as some limited grant assistance to ensure its member-cooperatives’ success.

How it All Worked

In the 1971 annual report, Prejean provided a number of success stories from the Federation’s various enterprises. These vignettes offer a glimpse into the fledgling Federation’s scope and impact: 

At Grand Marie Co-op, Sunset, Louisiana, the co-op completed its fifth season (1970-71 crop) in April with a small operating profit of $1,800—the first time the co-op was able to complete a season with profit. This was achieved on a sales volume of a quarter of a million dollars, 55,000 bushels shipped. The success would have been impossible without a loan of $96,000 from the Southern Cooperative Development Fund and the technical assistance and training inputs of the Federation.

In the spring of 1971, with the assistance of the Federation’s Marketing Specialist and a field consultant, the Sea Island Farmers Co-op, Frogmore, South Carolina, was able to market over $80,000 in tomatoes for 45 members at a net operating profit of $13,000. This year marked the first time [that] members stayed together to make a truly cooperative effort to market their crop. Farmers received an average of $2.62 a bushel for their tomatoes, which is more than in past seasons. They are expecting a small patronage refund while re-investing the remainder of their surplus in new facilities to improve efficiency. 

At Miss-Lou Farmers Co-op, operating in the four southwest Mississippi counties and two Louisiana parishes, the co-op had sales of cucumbers and peppers in 1970 of $63,425. This was a 176% increase over the 1969 crop of $23,000. Over the past four seasons of its existence, the co-op has consistently fought for higher prices for its members. For the period from 1967-1971, the co-op raised the price per hundred pounds paid to the farmers for cucumbers by $0.95 or 35.6% in comparison to its competitor’s prices. On an average yield of 7,000 lbs. per acre, this is an increase of $66.50 per acre to growers. On peppers, the co-op has caused the price to increase from 6.5¢ in 1969 to 8.5¢ in 1971, an increase of 23.4% over the past three years. This year as a result of [the Federation’s] membership training sessions, members in two communities purchased their own cucumber grading machines to increase their flexibility and advantage in marketing.

These brief glimpses into the operations of such modest cooperative enterprises demonstrate the power of the Federation’s involvement. By providing training, advice on marketing, crop selection, and cooperative governance, the Federation was able to smooth out some of the rough patches that each cooperative had experienced and help move the co-ops for the first time to profitability. It is also apparent that by combining the output of various individual farms (as in the Sea Island and Miss-Lou examples), the local co-op was able to force the price point for the products to a higher level, putting more money into the individual farmers’ pockets while also generating a margin for the cooperative.

 The Federation also played a critical role in advising co-ops on just how the cooperative enterprise was supposed to work: the role of the Board of Directors in the setting of policy; the role of the co-op manager in day-to-day operations; the importance of the one-member/one-vote democratic governance structure. Federation staff also served as sounding boards for inevitable disagreements that would arise about these finer points of cooperative operations.

Charles Prejean (second from right), along with Federation staff members John Zippert (sunglasses) and Ralph Paige (right) visit with local farmers to discuss their needs. 

By 1971, the Federation was receiving praise from important boosters. At its annual meeting that year, the American Institute for Cooperatives hosted CLUSA’s recently retired president and former U.S. Congressman Jerry Voorhis, who honored the Federation for “doing a job of outstanding importance” for the rural poor. Also that year, the Field Foundation’s Dunbar wrote Prejean to say that “all of us at Field are greatly impressed by what the Federation has accomplished.”

 It is instructive to note that of the 110 members in 1971, 25 of them were credit unions with a combined asset total of more than half a million dollars. That year, more than 2,500 loans had been made to their low-income members. This was micro-lending before the term had been coined, and it is a testament to both McKnight’s and Prejean’s vision that they had the foresight to understand that even small loans could make a big difference in the lives of low-income people with limited access to traditional funding sources.

Fifth in a Series on the Federation of Southern Cooperatives

Washington, DC loves political drama, whether it’s delivered daily through the news media or in the form of a retrospective. As we have enough of the former lately, it is instructive to have one of America’s most tumultuous periods served up to us through Arena Stage’s production of The Great Society, the newest play from Robert Schenkkan, whose All the Way won the Tony Award in 2014 and went on to be a blockbuster HBO TV film. All the Way chronicles the first year of LBJ’s presidency, from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to Johnson’s coronation as the Democratic nominee for President at the 1964 convention in Atlantic City. The Great Society picks up the thread right after that historic moment and carries us through the next chaotic four years of Johnson’s administration: through Selma, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the creation of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, the Watts riots, the Black Power movement, and, tragically, the escalation of the Vietnam War, which would sap the energy and the funding from Johnson’s grand vision of creating an American “Great Society.”

Arena Stage’s The Great Society. Art work by Richard Davies Tom.

Though the play (and the period) deserve their own epic review, I use the currency of the play’s premier in Washington to introduce the next section of my series on the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. It was, after all, Johnson’s Great Society program that helped launch the Federation 50 years ago and which funded many of its most innovative early projects before the program fell out of favor with Congressmen and local politicians, who wanted to control the federal funding project and use it for patronage rather than for serious improvement. Here is the Federation’s history in summary form detailing its connection to Johnson’s great achievement and how it helped provide the foundational support for an enduring cooperative legacy.

 LBJ’s Great Society and War on Poverty

The 1960s were a time of great optimism, despite the social upheaval. President John Kennedy had committed to putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. President Lyndon Johnson, in his first Inaugural Address less than two months after Kennedy’s assassination, declared a War on Poverty and the creation of a Great Society that would, he hoped, rival President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. There was the belief that if enough resources and focus could be brought to an endeavor, all things were possible and any problem could be solved, even the gnawing, persistent poverty that plagued much of the South.

In 1965, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was formed—a result of Johnson’s massive legislative push the year before, which included the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Criminal Justice Act of 1964, the Food Stamp Act of 1964, and, of course, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. [The Voting Rights Act—the crown jewel of Johnson’s legislative achievement—would come in 1965.] Nearly a billion dollars were earmarked for the fight against poverty. Funds would be distributed through Community Action Programs, some of which could be independent of state control so that funds could go directly to worthy projects—even experimental ones—that held the promise to raise the economic prospects for those most impoverished. The OEO legislation called for “maximum feasible participation” by the poor themselves—a clear signal that this effort was meant to be something other than business as usual. A special carve-out was provided in the legislation for cooperatives. Specifically, under Title III—Special Programs to Combat Poverty in Rural Areas, the law stated:

The Director is authorized to make loans to local cooperative associations furnishing essential processing, purchasing, or marketing services, supplies, or facilities predominantly to low-income rural families.

Many community organizers from the established civil rights organizations—SNCC, CORE, SCLC and even the NAACP—took hold of this language and began forming cooperative institutions in their areas that they believed could bypass the existing White stranglehold over agricultural production and marketing, as well as its lock on political patronage. The hope was that cooperative institutions would open up new opportunities for the impoverished Black citizens while educating them about basic principles of democratic participation as infused in the cooperative model. Co-ops would become, in the words of SCLC’s Albert Turner, “the economic arm of the civil rights movement.” [It was Turner who would as a catalyst for the Selma to Montgomery March by insisting that the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson be publicly addressed.]

Work on a Federation-member rural agricultural cooperative in the 1970s.

Thanks to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, millions of federal dollars began flooding into the South beginning as early as 1965. The beneficiaries of some of these funds were newly formed cooperatives that had been struggling to find a foothold. Such organizations as the Southwest Alabama Farmers Cooperative Association, Ezra Cunningham’s organization, and the Southern Consumers Cooperative—McKnight’s and Prejean’s initiative, received grants for a variety of “demonstration projects” to prove that their programs could, in fact, work to improve the conditions of the rural poor.

The Federation was a direct beneficiary of this early War on Poverty largesse. In addition, its initial funding came from the Cooperative League of the USA (CLUSA)—a forerunner of today’s National Cooperative Business Association—in the form of a $35,000 grant which derived from CLUSA’s own larger OEO-funded cooperative development project. [Additional start-up funding was provided by the Aaron Norman Fund and the New York Foundation.] Indeed, CLUSA’s Merlin Miller and Chuck Ihlenfeld were present when the idea for the Federation was hatched at Mount Beulah.

More front-end funding and encouragement came from the International Self-Help Housing Association (ISHHA), a Quaker-initiated organization; from the Southern Regional Council, a White progressive group working for equality in Southern race relations which by this point was running the important voting rights initiative, the Voter Education Project; and from the National Sharecroppers Fund, an advocacy group for sharecroppers and tenant farmers that grew out of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. Thus, the various threads of the progressive movement—cooperatives, religious, civil rights and economic justice groups—coalesced to form what would become a potent mechanism for the empowerment of some of the least powerful citizens in America. The next fifty years would be a thrilling, if bumpy, ride for the Federation.

An early Federation training session (1970s) for Black farmers.

Uphill Battle

It is instructive to consider that, aside from the Federation’s initial explosive growth and the federal and foundation funding it attracted in the late 1960s, the organization was fighting an uphill battle almost from the start. Two major factors ensured this Sisyphean struggle would continue: the lack of political will to continue the War on Poverty and the all-pervasive and blatant discrimination against Black farmers practiced by Southern federal government employees who were accommodated by their superiors all the way up the line to Washington, DC. 

First, the Nixon administration, which took over the reins of federal government in 1969, began systematically dismantling President Johnson’s Great Society programs, starting with the OEO. Nixon put young Illinois Congressman Donald Rumsfeld in charge of the agency. Rumsfeld quickly spun-off the most popular programs to other agencies (Job Corps to the Department of Labor; Head Start to HEW), thus weakening the OEO’s cabinet-level status. Rumsfeld also started a process of defunding some of the more successful programs or forcing expensive evaluations of their poverty-fighting methods. In early 1973, at the start of Nixon’s second term, the President further gutted the agency by removing any budgetary allotment for Community Action Programs—the very ones that were funding the Federation’s grassroots cooperative organizing efforts and those of its members. “After more than 7 years … further federal spending on behalf of this concept, beyond the $2.8 billion which has already been spent on it since 1965, no longer seems necessary or desirable,” Nixon told Congress that year. 

Discussion at one of the Federation’s earliest Annual Meetings (1970s), just as the Nixon Administration was busy cutting back on the War on Poverty.

The OEO continued to limp along in various guises until another conservative reformer, President Ronald Reagan, broke it up completely in 1981. Reagan would later cynically—though cheerfully—say in his weekly radio address, “In 1964 the famous War on Poverty was declared and a funny thing happened. I guess you could say, poverty won the war.” It wasn’t funny to those in the rural areas of the Deep South who were trying to make it on less than $1,000 a year. Fortunately for them, the Federation had begun to diversify its funding sources so that even in the Nixon years, significant dollars came from a variety of federal and state agencies, as well as foundations and church-based groups.

 By 1973, for example, only 5% of the Federation’s $1.5 million income was derived from OEO funding. Significantly greater amounts came from the U.S. Commerce Department’s Office of Minority Business Enterprise ($613,000) and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (nearly $300,000 for jobs training programs and $110,000 for the Black Belt health care initiative). Much of the rest of the funds came from various foundations and church groups, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund ($150,000), the Ford Foundation ($92,000), and the Field Foundation ($77,700). An impressive $24,000 was raised from staff contributions.

For more information about the War on Poverty and how it played out in the rural South, consult Susan Youngblood Ashmore’s Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama 1964-1972

Third in a Series on the Federation of Southern Cooperatives

At its 50th Anniversary celebration in Birmingham, Alabama, earlier this year, Congressman John Lewis provided a fitting tribute to the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and its essential contribution to the economic justice and civil rights in the rural South during the past 50 years. I was fortunate to be present at the celebration and (a little belatedly) realized I could capture the moment on video if I acted quickly. What follows is my attempt to preserve for history Lewis’s powerful remarks of congratulation and encouragement to the Federation’s members and staff. Also included below is the tribute Lewis provided for our commemorative booklet.

Congressman John Lewis addressing a Federation Annual Meeting in the 1980s. Lewis has had a long and storied history with the Federation.

Congressman Lewis had direct involvement in the Federation’s start, as he notes early in his remarks (which we enter “in media res” as they say), making a “small grant” to the fledgling organization while working for the Southern Regional Council as part of the Community Organization Project.  During this short video, Lewis also tells his now-famous (and hilarious) chicken story. Take a look and a listen …

In Part II of his presentation (less than 2 minutes), Congressman Lewis exhorts the audience to “never give up” and to continue supporting the Federation’s mission and work. He also gives a nice shout-out to A. Phillip Randolph.