According to Monica White, WEB Dubois held the belief that cooperatives had been essential to economic independence for African-Americans in the midst of race-based hostility. For Dubois cooperatives offered a strategy for resisting segregation and marginalization. Dubois advocated centering the needs of black consumers and thereby ensuring greater social justice and economic equity for black communities. Black owned and operated cooperatives could offer better wages and working conditions, and quality products. He championed African-American control of their food system from growing, and harvesting, to processing and selling food at retail outlets. He insisted a cooperative cash control system would prove far more cost effective than debt. Dubois also believed successful cooperatives had to have a plan to educate its members about how cooperatives worked.