CMA Co-op's Strategy
Courtesy of the Atlanta Daily World
Historian Gordon Nembhard describes the NNBL’s CMA as an association of entrepreneurs in the grocery store industry who voluntarily came together to organize for the purpose of buying and advertising products more advantageously in the face of growing competition from white-owned grocery store chains. In the 1920s, white grocery store chains across the country had been orchestrating a white supremacist terrorist campaign against black businesses to put them out of business. NNBL leaders had been observing the same trend and mobilized its organization to develop a cooperative response. The CMA employed a strategy that included improving accounting methods, modernizing stores, and championing the power of African-American consumers. These pillars of its program they believed would improve the profit of store owners, provide jobs to residents who lived near CMA stores, and provide better products and services for African-Americans.
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