#federation50th

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Carol Prejean Zippert – the Creative Voice of the Federation

 Fourth in a Series on the Federation of Southern Cooperatives

Every movement has its poet, its chronicler, it’s creative voice. For the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, that voice—for its entire 50 years—has been Carol Prejean Zippert. As a young girl, Carol became enthralled with Father McKnight and his organizing for black economic empowerment. She and her brother, Charles (who would become the Federation’s first Executive Director), were present when the Federation was incorporated. And she would be part of the Federation’s fabric for its entire first 50 years—and is still active in the organization’s life and work. [She now serves as President of the Friends of Greene County Employees Federal Credit Union, a Federation member.] 

Carol Prejean Zippert in the 1980s, about the time she began writing poetry for and about the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

 At some point in the 1980s, Carol began writing poetry, some of it focused on the Federation and its work. Her poems became regular features in the Federation’s annual reports and she would be a welcome speaker at the co-op’s annual meeting, reading her most recent creation to an enthralled membership. 

Included below is the poem we chose to lead off the 50th anniversary commemorative book: One Day We Created a New Family. It perfectly summarizes the why and the how behind the Federation’s long and storied history. Following the poem is a brief biographical sketch of Carol and her husband of more than 50 years, activist and long-time Federation employee John Zippert. Be inspired!

 One Day We Created A New Family 

By Carol Prejean Zippert

 One day when we needed

new birth to help us discover

our history, live our culture

and pursue our justice,

we created a new family.

 One day when we needed

to reclaim our dignity and respect,

when we needed to lift our heads

and open our eyes and minds,

we created a new family.

 One day when we needed

to find our sisters and brothers

in struggle and form a bond

for our mutual survival

we created a new family.

 One day when we needed

to save our children

to extend their lives and learnings,

when we needed to prepare them

        as community-directed leaders,

we created a new family.

 One day when we needed

to rediscover God’s earth

and all its gifts, to appreciate the soil,

waters, all living creatures and resources,

we created a new family.

 One day when we needed

to save our land, build our houses,

provide for our healthcare,

secure our right to vote,

and assert our political leadership,

we created a new family.

 One day when we needed

to form a more responsive society,

when we needed to secure more

loving communities,

we created a new family.

 One day when we needed

a new family

for ourselves and for our children,

for our communities and for our nation,

One day when we needed to celebrate God’s world

We created a new family,

We created the Federation –

the FSC family.

 One day we needed

a new family. 

©2017 Carol Prejean Zippert 

Carol’s two volumes of poetry, I Don’t Want to Be Rich, Just Able and Meeting Myself ‘Round the Corner, both published by NewSouth Books (Montgomery, AL) can be ordered by writing to her at  P.O. Box 82, Eutaw, Alabama 35462.

 John and Carol (Prejean) Zippert 

John and Carol met while working in the civil rights and cooperative movement in southwest Louisiana. John was a volunteer and later field staff with the Congress of Racial Equality in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. John was working on registering minority voters, integrating public accommodations and helping sweet potato and vegetable farmers to develop a cooperative to market their produce. 

Carol was working with the Southern Consumers Cooperative while attending the University of Southwest Louisiana. She participated in a special program to study cooperatives and credit unions nationally and internationally in Canada and Turkey. 

When John and Carol decided to get married in 1967, they had to sue the State of Louisiana to remove its miscegenation statute to allow them to get a marriage license. Partners in both life and the pursuit for racial, social, and economic justice in the U.S. South, John and Carol (Prejean) Zippert continue to embody the principles and priorities of the two movements that shaped their lives—the civil rights movement and the cooperative movement.

Rev. A. J. McKnight after officiating at the marriage of John Zippert and Carol Prejean--the first such marriage in the state of Louisiana after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that bans on interracial marriage were illegal.

 Father A. J. McKnight first kindled the couple’s passion and commitment to the cooperative movement. The same year they were married, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives was chartered. John and Carol were involved as community organizers with the cooperatives and credit unions and participated in the meetings that resulted in the formation of the Federation. John and Carol’s lives progressed in parallel with the mission of the Federation and the growth of the cooperative movement in the South.

 For nearly five decades, John has worked for the Federation. For the past quarter century, he has served as the Director of Program Operations for the Federation at its Rural Training and Research Center in Epes, Alabama, where he has promoted cooperative economic development for low-income and minority people in ten Southeastern United States. In the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, John expanded the Training Center’s reach to include relief work, enlisting cooperatives to help individuals, families, and other co-ops to recover and rebuild along the Gulf Coast.

 John Zippert speaking on behalf of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in the 1980s.

 During his career at the Federation, John has trained staff, mentored countless young people and designed programs to further sustainable small farming and cooperative development. The Federation honored John’s dedication with its Staff Award in 1977, 1978 and 1996. 

John serves on the board of numerous state and national organizations, including the Rural Coalition, Rural Development Leadership Network, Alabama New South Coalition, Alabama Black Belt Commission, and others. John has been involved in advocacy and public policy development for family farmers, as well as for rural and cooperative development. He also assisted hundreds of African-American farmers in filing successful claims in the Pigford Class Action discrimination lawsuits.

John and Carol in the late 1960s.

 In 1985, Carol earned her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership, Supervision, and Curriculum Development from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. As a self-described “community worker,” she dedicated five decades to building leadership and developing co-ops with the Federation—where she continues to volunteer—as well as supporting grassroots community groups in their work to achieve social transformation. Carol has served as an adjunct research professor and resource specialist for Tuskegee University’s Community-Based Youth Partnerships. She has been involved with the 21st Century Youth Leadership movement since its inception in 1986 and continues to serve on its board.

 Carol Prejean Zippert (center) serves as president of Friends of Greene County Employees Federal Credit Union. She is standing in front of the credit union’s new headquarters on the Eutaw (AL) town square with manager Joyce Pham (l) and accounting clerk Kiera Epps (r).

 Carol is also president and founder of the Federation of Greene Country Employees (FOGCE) Federal Credit Union. Under her leadership, low-income people of one of the poorest counties in the U.S. built a credit union that has accumulated more than $1.4 million in assets. In addition, Carol’s poetry and leadership in cultural organizations such as the Black Belt Community Foundation and the Greene County Society for Folk Arts and Culture strengthen connections and trust among people, their co-ops, and their communities. 

Since 1985, John and Carol have together published the Greene County Democrat Newspaper, a weekly publication to inform and educate their primarily African-American community.

John and Carol Zippert (center) at the Co-op Hall of Fame induction ceremony in May 2017 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

In 2017, the couple was inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame, the highest honor awarded to cooperative activists, sponsored by the Cooperative Development Foundation and the National Cooperative Business Association.

 John and Carol with their three children at the Federation’s Rural Training Center in Epes, Alabama, in the 1970s.

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The Start of the Southern Black Cooperative Movement

Second in a Series on the Federation of Southern Cooperatives

I’m reading a little-known but important work by former U.S. Labor Secretary Ray Marhsall and former Ford and Rockefeller Foundations executive Lamond Godwin called “Cooperatives and Rural Poverty in the South”, published in 1971 by Johns Hopkins Press. It discusses the very things I wrote about this summer in “50 Years of Courage, Cooperation, Commitment & Community”—the 50th Anniversary Commemorative book on the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. Even then, back in 1971, it was clear that the South needed cooperative organizations to help break through the cultural barriers to Blacks in agriculture. Thankfully, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives came along. Here is its foundational story. . . .

Mural (partial) at the Federation’s Rural Training Center in Epes, Alabama, created by the noted artist and graphic designer Donald Alexander (aka, ALDOX), from Lafayette, Louisiana--a hotbed of cooperative development in the 1960s.

It is difficult to precisely pinpoint how the idea of creating Southern Black-owned cooperatives initiated. Agricultural cooperatives, of course, were nothing new in America. The Midwest abounded with them, as did the segregated South. They were a way for farmers to realize economies of scale in the purchase of seed and fertilizer, to coordinate the sale and marketing of their crops, to gain some power in a volatile agricultural marketplace. They were also a way to exert some control, since the co-op was owned by the farmers it served. None of these points were lost on the Blacks who were trying to find a way out of the restrictive stranglehold of the White power structure. Surely the influence of the union and other collectivist, progressive movements of the 1930s and ‘40s also had a lasting impact.

Whatever the genesis, it was in the late 1950s that the idea of forming locally based farmer cooperatives seemed to take hold. One instigator was the Reverend A. J. McKnight, a Catholic priest from Brooklyn who had joined the Holy Ghost (Spiritan) Order and was assigned as pastor to an impoverished Black parish in Lafayette, Louisiana. McKnight was charged up with a fire to improve the lot of his parishioners and immediately began holding voter registration and literacy classes in the hope of helping the indigenous Black populace to gain a level of political power. But when few folks showed up for the classes, McKnight was stunned. Surely, they must want their freedom!

Wisely, McKnight began holding listening sessions to determine the “felt needs” of the community, rather than imposing his own vision of what was required. “One need that surfaced many times was how difficult and how expensive it was to borrow money,” McKnight would later write. With this insight, he realized that the first brick in what he was hoping would be a vast Southern cooperative structure was to create credit unions so that individuals in low-income communities could have access to capital. Because of the inherent difficulties with growing a capital base with limited funds in low-income communities, however, McKnight eventually struck upon the idea of creating a regional investment cooperative that could attract funding from outside sources and become the mechanism for funding all manner of cooperative enterprises. This became the Southern Consumers Cooperative (SCC), established in 1964. McKnight used to enjoy boasting, as he did in his autobiography Whistling in the Wind, that SCC “received the first loan in the War on Poverty”—$25,000 to help start one of SCC’s subsidiaries, a bakery called Arcadian Delight, which offered fruitcakes and other Creole delicacies and helped put people to work. SCC formed a number of other subsidiaries, including an education arm (Southern Consumers Education Foundation) and a capital development and lending arm (People’s Enterprise).  

Reverend A.J. McKnight--a leader in the creation of the Southern Black Cooperative Movement. 

Besides his fervor for cooperatives, McKnight’s very presence in southwest Louisiana was revolutionary. He was the first Black priest the parish had ever had. “It was a big deal,” said Carol Prejean, who was ten-years-old at the time McKnight arrived in the 1953. She and her older brother Charles began hanging out at the church, trying to imbibe the fresh wind of change that McKnight was preaching. McKnight seemed to embolden local Blacks to think bigger than they ever had before, to create their own institutions, to work their way out of the grinding poverty and dependence on the White ruling class that had characterized their existence for generations. Charles Prejean was smitten with McKnight’s fervor and determined that he, too, would become a priest. After a few years at seminary, however, he realized that a celibate life didn’t suit him, so he returned to Lafayette to work with McKnight and help build the cooperative institutions McKnight had begun dreaming up. “I came to the understanding,” Prejean said, “that the sense of communal life that I was being taught in the seminary was transferable—working in a community for the betterment of the community.” Prejean first volunteered with McKnight as a community organizer while teaching at the local Catholic high school; then he was brought on full time, first at People’s Enterprise and later, when McKnight was forced to spend more of his time on pastoral work, as general manager of SCC.

 But McKnight and the Prejeans were not the only cooperative boosters in the South. Indigenous cooperative institutions seemed to spring up everywhere all at once, usually sparked by a local need that could not be filled by other means and often spurred by White intransigence. For instance: 

·       When farmers and sharecroppers working for voting rights in west Tennessee were denied the ability to buy gasoline for their tractors from local White-owned gas stations, they started driving to the Missouri bootheel, just over the state line, to buy gas and oil and trucked it back home. Thus, the Mid-South Consumers Oil Co-op was born.

 ·       When a group of impoverished Black women in rural Alabama showed their handmade quilts to a Northern Episcopalian priest, he arranged for their wares to be shown at craft fairs up North where he knew a ready market would be enthralled. Thus, the Freedom Quilting Bee was born.  

 ·       When a group of Black sweet potato farmers realized they could break up the White landowners’ purchasing and distribution monopoly in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, by working together, the Grand Marie Vegetable Producers Co-op was born.

 ·       When sharecroppers in Sumter County, Alabama, got involved in advocating for equal rights and were evicted from the land their families had farmed for generations, forty of these families banded together to find a way to purchase their own land. Thus, the Panola Land Buying Association (PLBA) came into being.

 ·       When Black farmers in ten Black Belt counties of Alabama began comparing notes, they realized they could likely get a better price for their cucumbers, okra, and peas if they were to combine their output and mass market their crops. Thus, the Southwest Alabama Farmers Cooperative Association (SWAFCA) was born.

 It was these start-up co-ops that formed the nucleus of what would become the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. We have Al Ulmer to thank for pulling them all together. Ulmer was director of community outreach for the Southern Regional Council and had spotted a trend in majority Black counties throughout the South. It was Ulmer who invited and underwrote the travel expenses for representatives of ten of these emerging co-ops to a meeting in the spring of 1966 at the Mount Beulah Center, a church-based conference center just west of Jackson, Mississippi, where civil rights groups often met. 

Al Ulmer, Director of Community Outreach for the Southern Regional Council, identified a trend among rural Blacks for developing self-empowering cooperatives and invited their leaders to a gathering in Edwards, MS, which would become the foundational meeting of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

Once gathered, co-op representatives swapped information, learned more about each other’s cooperative enterprises, and began to conceive of a plan to coordinate and scale up their activities. All of them—each in their own sectors—were up against incredible odds, given the harsh racial climate of the times. Black people were not supposed to be successful. They were only supposed to thrive if they served and were subservient to the Whites in power. They weren’t supposed to create their own pathways to power or economic security. But as is the case in all societies, the poor find their own ways to survive, often outside of the established norms. They “make a way out of no way.” In the rural South of the 1960s, cooperatives seemed like one of the best ways to a better future.

 The Mount Beulah meeting led to a second gathering—again arranged for by Ulmer—in February of the following year, this time in Atlanta on the campus of Atlanta University. Those in attendance—22 representatives from various cooperatives in nine states throughout the South—agreed to establish a loose confederation of cooperatives to help them coordinate their activities and find ways of making each individual cooperative stronger. They called this new organization the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

 NEXT: Carol Prejean’s Documentary Poetry of the Federation and a John Lewis 50th Anniversary Tribute.