Join us for a special book launch event to learn about the history of African American cooperative economics from a leading co-op scholar/activist, and hear local updates on ONE DC’s Black Worker’s Center and Impact Hub DC‘s worker cooperative incubator.

In Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives.

Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies’ Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing.

This free event is co-sponsored by The Democracy Collaborative, ONE DC, Impact Hub DC, Equal Exchange, the New Economy Working Group (IPS), and Divine Chocolate.

Doors open for meet-and greet at 6:30pm, local updates and book talk starts at 7pm. A book-signing and reception will follow the talk.

RSVP now, or read on for more information.