CMA Revenue Plan
Courtesy of The New York Amsterdam News
We have been talking about developments in the grocery store industry in the 1920s. At the time increasingly white wholesalers refused to sell to black grocery store merchants at wholesale prices, making it impossible for them to compete with their white counterparts. In response, African Americans in Montgomery Alabama organized a voluntary chain store cooperative they called the Colored Merchants Association (CMA). The members of the association had also been members of the NNBL. Overtime the NNBL expanded the CMA into a national cooperative grocery store movement. Historian John Burrows Burrows argues from the start, the NNBL’s Albon Holsey had been fixated on a good working relationship between the NNBL’s CMA cooperative and white-owned national manufacturers of food products. Burrows writes, “Hosley saw the promotion, distribution, and sale of national brand food items” as the key to attracting advertising dollars from large food companies such as the H. J. Heinz Company and others.
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