To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Becoming more deeply enmeshed in the group, Camille learns truths about the collective-and about herself-that she may not be able to survive.In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Fueled by mutual rage, these women orchestrate their own brand of justice through precise, anonymous, complexly plotted and perfectly executed revenge killings, with individual members completing a specific and integral task in each plan.Īs Camille struggles to comprehend whether this is a role-playing exercise or terrifying reality, she must decide if these women are truly avenging angels or monsters. When her rash actions attract the attention of a secret group of women-the collective-Camille is drawn into a dark web where these mothers share their wildly different stories of loss as well as their desire for justice in a world where privilege denies accountability and perpetrators emerge unscathed. Just how far will a grieving mother go to right a tragic wrong?Ĭamille Gardner is a grieving-and angry-mother who, five years after her daughter’s death, is still obsessed with the privileged young man she believes to be responsible. It’s not my first book by Gaylin and it certainly won’t be my last! Add to that shocking secrets and harrowing choices and you’ve got a book that demands to be read in one sitting.

The Collective is an unflinching look at female rage and the power of women’s bonds. But before long, fantasy turns to action and Camille grapples with whether she’s part of an elaborate role-play or a member of a group plotting vigilante killings.

There, the women not only indulge each other’s anger, but stoke it through collectively devised revenge fantasies. Consumed by anger toward the privileged boy who evaded all consequences and resentful of the common platitudes she receives from those around her to help her “move on,” Camille at last finds solace in a dark underworld of mothers who have tragically lost children. What would I do? In The Collective, Alison Gaylin asks a doozy: If someone killed your child, would you want them dead?Ĭamille Gardener is living a shell of her former life years after the death of her teenage daughter. I’m a sucker for a fast-paced thriller with a compelling “what would you do” premise: Would you take stolen money and run? Would you keep your partner’s murderous past a secret? Would you crash a plane or save your family, if forced to choose? I love them because these types of books immediately drop me right into the shoes of the protagonist.

Booku collective