What the Cooperative Already Knows: Maroon Economics After the Tithing Debate

If the previous post in this series — "Ten Percent of What, For What" — sat with the diagnosis, this post is for the work after the diagnosis. The naming was: tithing in our institutions sometimes does what it claims and sometimes does the opposite, and you cannot tell from the outside. The next question is the one Reweaving the Tear always asks: what already exists that we have stopped using?

The maroon answer to the extraction question is not new. The maroon answer is older than the question.

In 1903 Maggie Lena Walker — Sunday School superintendent, daughter of a formerly enslaved woman, member of the Independent Order of St. Luke at First African Baptist Church in Richmond — chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. She did it because Black women's tithes and dues, gathered through the Order of St. Luke's mutual aid network, were sitting in white-owned banks that loaned the money out to white businesses while denying mortgages to the same Black women whose deposits were funding the lending. She founded a bank — the first chartered by a woman of any race in the United States — to close the loop. The Black church (specifically, Black church women) gave money. The bank, owned by those women's mutual aid order, lent the money back to those women's communities. The mortgage that built the house came from the dues that built the church that taught the woman who started the bank. There was no extraction.

Nannie Helen Burroughs was at this work too. The National Training School for Women and Girls in D.C. — funded almost entirely by Black Baptist women's offerings, structured so that the women's authority over the money never left the women's authority over the school — produced two generations of teachers, business owners, and movement organizers. Her motto: we specialize in the wholly impossible. The capital base for the impossible was tithes, taken from women whose annual income would not have qualified them for any white commercial bank's smallest line of credit. Pooled, governed by them, deployed by them, it built a school that built a class.

The Combahee Coffee Cooperative — and yes, the Combahee in Combahee River Collective — is the same logic at a different scale: Black women pooling resources, governing the pool together, returning the surplus to the members. The Black church credit union movement, which exploded after WWII when GIs returning home could not get loans, is the same logic again. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, founded in 1967 to keep Black-owned land in Black hands, is the same logic again. Mutual aid networks at the Black Methodist congregations during the AIDS crisis when nobody else would bury the bodies — same logic again.

The maroon economic tradition has always known what to do with ten percent.

It pools it. It governs it. It returns it. It refuses to let the same money do extraction and mutual aid through the same institution. It separates the functions. The pastor's compensation comes from one fund. The benevolence ministry comes from another. The endowment is governed by trustees who can be voted out. The community development fund is run by an autonomous board the pastor cannot dissolve. The credit union, when there is one, is owned by the members, not the corporation.

Word in Black's coverage of the Spend in the Black movement this March is the contemporary face of this tradition. Spend in the Black asks Black communities to direct discretionary spending toward Black-owned businesses for a sustained period as an act of economic mobilization with a faith spine. It is the same posture: pool, govern, return. It is what the Sunday School superintendents have been teaching the youth groups for a hundred years, finally back in the bulletin.

Reweaving the tear after the tithing debate does not require quitting the tradition. It requires resurrecting the parts of the tradition the institution forgot. There is a reason every Black mutual aid order — Eastern Star, the Masons, the Order of St. Luke, the Daughters of the Tabernacle, the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks — used to be ecclesially adjacent. The orders held the financial governance the congregations could not be trusted to hold alone. The orders' books were audited by the orders' own elected officers. The orders' surplus went to the orders' own scholarship funds, burial funds, sickness funds. When the orders weakened — and they did, deliberately weakened by the same forces that gave us prosperity gospel — what was left was the congregation alone, with no accountability structure parallel to it. The pastor became the bank. The bank stopped being a cooperative.

The maroon answer is to put the cooperative back.

This does not have to be heroic. It can be a benevolence committee that publishes its books. It can be a women's society that retains autonomous control of the funds it raises. It can be a credit union the church chooses to seed and not absorb. It can be a transparent annual financial meeting at which any tithing member can demand a line item. It can be a partnership between three congregations to build one cooperative endowment that none of them can raid alone. It can be the choir's Bermuda trip fund being audited by the choir, not by the trustee board. It can be Sister Bernadine — who actually runs the food pantry — having signature authority on the food pantry account.

These are small institutional repairs. They are also the actual answer to Erykah Badu's question. Should I tithe? becomes what governance does this congregation have that I am willing to participate in? And if the answer is none worth my participation, the maroon move is not to leave the tradition. The maroon move is to seed the cooperative beside the congregation and let the congregation grow into the relationship.

This is what the Combahee women did. This is what Maggie Walker did. This is what Nannie Burroughs did. This is what Spend in the Black is asking us to do at scale. The tradition is older than the extraction, and the institutional repair is older than the diagnosis.

The Anancy Webwork lesson here: reweaving the tear does not require new thread. The maroon already wove it. We are the ones who forgot how to read the pattern. Pick up the cooperative. Pick up the credit union. Pick up the women's society's autonomy. Pick up the transparent benevolence ministry. The mutual aid is already in the tradition. We just have to put it back where it belongs.