Part Two: The Colored Farmers Alliance and Early Black Cooperativism in the US
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.7 • 902 Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
Margaret continues her talk with Courtney Kocak about the potentially million-strong alliance of Black farmers who built up a cooperative economics in the post-war American South
Sources:
https://greekcitytimes.com/2025/02/07/the-helots-a-labour-force/
https://www.lucyparsonsproject.com/writings/negro.html
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https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=TE009
https://worldblackhistory.blogspot.com/2022/11/blog-post_11.html
https://lawyersgunsmon.wpengine.com/2012/12/this-day-in-labor-history-december-11-1886
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/09/day-labor-history-september-25-1891
https://temple.manifoldapp.org/read/the-black-worker-during-the-era-of-the-knights-of-labor-volume-iii/section/cf118f82-0d04-4251-9934-c474e4daef2e
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40030730?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2025/08/07/doj-secures-first-criminal-conviction-in-wage-fixing-case/
https://ncbaclusa.coop/content/uploads/2023/02/Fall-2022_Winter-2023-Cooperative-Business-Journal_FINAL-v2.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40030730
https://www.givinggrove.org/blog-reference/black-farmers-in-america
https://snccdigital.org/events/fannie-lou-hamer-founds-freedom-farm-cooperative/
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/November-15/the-march-to-the-sea-begins
https://explorethearchive.com/shermans-march-to-the-sea
https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/teachers/lessonplans/Document6(SpecialOrder).pdf
https://www.grunge.com/601373/what-you-should-know-about-the-granger-movement-of-the-1860s/
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https://www.jstor.org/stable/40030586?read-now=1&seq=7#page_scan_tab_contents
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:06.0 | CoolZone Media. |
| 0:09.0 | Hello and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff. |
| 0:11.4 | Your weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, |
| 0:13.7 | there's people trying to do good things. |
| 0:15.2 | And one of the people who I think does good things, |
| 0:19.1 | like write books and do podcasts, is my guest, Courtney Kosak. |
| 0:24.3 | Hi. |
| 0:24.9 | Hello. |
| 0:25.9 | How are you? |
| 0:26.5 | I'm good. |
| 0:27.5 | I'm so excited after that cliffhanger. |
| 0:30.1 | What's in store for week two, or episode two? |
| 0:32.8 | Well, one of the things that's going to happen is I'm going to remember to introduce Sophie. |
| 0:37.1 | Hi, Sophie hi Sophie |
| 0:37.6 | Sophie's my producer hey I started breaking from my format of how I start every single episode and now |
| 0:44.3 | I'm like left in the darkness of not knowing exactly how I do it yeah I'm trying new stuff I'm |
| 0:49.9 | exploring that's a cool thing yeah live. Live your truth. Yeah. So this is part two of a two-parter, and if you don't listen to part one, then you have a different brain than I do. Yeah, you're going to miss out on all the context. Yeah. You're not going to know what the hell sharecropper is unless you actually paid attention in school or... I didn't teach that shit in school. |
| 1:12.6 | I think my school did, but I had like a kind of cool social studies teacher that in |
| 1:16.6 | retrospect was so obviously a lesbian. |
| 1:21.9 | The way that the Gay Straight Alliance started my high school was that I was going to regional gay |
... |
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