Are current series looks at Fannie Lou Hamer’s 1970s Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) initiative in Sunflower, County Mississippi. Economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard maintains that Hamer created a cooperative because over her lifetime she had learned not to trust government assistance programs for the poor. She had come to believe in the power of cooperatives principles but the people she thought to help largely did not. Too many had been sharecroppers who never had the experience of cooperative farming outside of working with family members. Second, as the children of sharecroppers, Hamer and the people she sought to help never developed successful financial principles to manage their own lives never mind a business built on debt. Third, too many of the people Hamer wanted to help viewed farm labor in general as undesirable and those who wanted to farm desired to individually own the land they farmed; they did not understand the concept of a cooperative; instead they viewed the strategy as foreign.
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