CMA Grocery Stores
Courtesy of Detroit Public Library
In the late 1920s, increasing hostility from white individuals in the grocery store industry in Montgomery, Alabama, led NNBL members and African-American grocery store owners to organize a cooperative. The movement began because white wholesalers refused to sell to black grocery store merchants at wholesale prices, making it impossible for them to compete with their white counterparts who purchased merchandise at lower prices. In response, on August 10, 1928, AC Brown and other African-American grocery merchants in Montgomery organized a voluntary chain store cooperative they called the Colored Merchants Association (CMA). Brown, who owned five stores at the time, mobilized 14 other black grocers in the city and persuaded them of the financial savings that would come to each of them individually from a cooperative buying and advertising strategy. He told them, “Cooperate or Close up.” They selected H.C. Ball as president and David F. Lowe, Jr. as secretary. Each member store had the signage CMA Store with the name of the owner underneath. The group’s representative purchased needed package products at wholesale prices in Birmingham, Alabama, Nashville, Tennessee, and other cities and negotiated with local producers for the best prices for meat, poultry, dairy products, and produce sold in CMA member stores. Montgomery’s CMA emphasized purchasing cooperatively and selling intensively. And it taught its members how to sell and how to increase product turnover to increase their profit margins. They advertised special sales of products cooperatively in Montgomery newspapers and thrived.
