An interracial farmer’s co-op built upon the principles of cooperative communalism existed for 20 years in rural Mississippi. Scholar Robert Hunt Ferguson explores this socio-economic experiment in his book “Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi” (The University of Georgia Press 2018). Ferguson is a professor of history at Western Carolina University.
He talks with host Frank Stasio about the unlikely collaboration between former slaves, sharecroppers, religious leaders and labor unionists. They explore how this community survived the depression and abject racism of the time.
