Southeastern Cooperative League

The Southeastern Cooperative League, an interracial organization established as the Southeastern Cooperative Education Association in 1940, became a federation of cooperatives in 1941. It worked to promote agricultural, consumer, manufacturing, and housing cooperatives throughout the Southeast from 1940 until its demise in the early 1950s.

The Southeastern Cooperative League grew out of the earlier Southeastern Cooperative Education Association (SCEA), established in 1940 by an interracial group of university professors and religious and labor leaders. The SCEA, which had resulted from interest aroused in cooperative education by two conferences on this topic in 1939 and 1940, sought to promote cooperatives in the southeastern states through public education. These states were Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. In 1941 the SCEA became a federation of cooperatives, renaming itself the Southeastern Cooperative League and affiliating itself with the Cooperative League of the U.S.A. In this new capacity it worked mainly to coordinate the efforts of member cooperatives, to provide them with guidance and information, and to sponsor educational conferences and workshops. The League hoped to establish a wholesale house for cooperative stores, but these plans never materialized. The League patterned its organization on the philosophy of the nineteenth-century Rochdale cooperative movement in England.

In its early years the League supported its efforts primarily through grants from the General Education Board and the Julius Rosenwald Fund. It also raised revenue through membership fees and the sale of literature. Later financial aid came from the Rochdale Institute and the National Cooperative League and from individual contributions. An executive committee, made up of the organization's officers and two representatives of cooperatives from each state, governed the League. The Executive Committee served primarily in an advisory capacity, while a handful of officers carried out the bulk of the organization's work.

Lee M. Brooks, University of North Carolina professor of sociology, served as the first president of the League, resigning in 1949. Edward Yeomans, a professor at West Georgia College, served as the organization's secretary-treasurer from 1940 to 1944, and operated the League's office in Carollton, Georgia. He acted as the primary organizer for the League. From 1941 to 1943 Elizabeth Lynch, assistant secretary, and Charles MacGill Smith, field representative, supported Yeoman's efforts. Because of wartime difficulties, the League found itself unable to respond adequately to its members' needs and existed mostly in name from 1942 to mid-1946. During this period it ceased to operate except as an information clearinghouse, with even this function dropping off dramatically. The League stayed alive primarily through the efforts of Morris R. Mitchell, founder of the Macedonia Cooperative Community in Clarkesville, Georgia. Mitchell became executive secretary in July 1946, and reopened a League office in Clarkesville. Under his direction, the League underwent a reorganization, with several new Executive Committee members added and D.R. Graham succeeding Lee M. Brooks as president. The League restored some of its educational and promotional functions, but it never again flourished, and finally folded in the early 1950s.