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Neil, Lucy Fellow, co-authors paper on the importance of Black business schools

Between the US Civil War and the end of segregation, over 100 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were founded in the South. Many have business and economics departments. Once these schools were leaders in teaching critical political economy (see Haynes & Gordon Nembhard, 1999), but this leadership has largely disappeared.

What happened? The case of the department of business administration at Bluefield Institute (now known as Bluefield State College), West Virginia, is informative. In the 1920s and 1930s, Bluefield’s business school developed an extensive program of cooperative economics and experiential business teaching. Today, few traces of this pedagogical innovation remain.

The idea that Black business schools could and should do more to have a greater social impact, instead of simply “teaching capitalism” to a demographic that traditionally lacked access to capital, has existed for over a century. A key influence that emerged at Bluefield was the work of pioneering African American thinker and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois (1868 -1963). Today, Du Bois occupies a central place in post-colonial and African American studies (Gates Jr., 2011). However, his seminal thinking on economic cooperation has received comparatively little attention (Gordon Nembhard, 2014). By reviving this forgotten legacy and reconstructing the influence it had on a prominent HBCU, we help recover a rich and intricate history of Black business schools as sites of intellectual, political, and economic activism.

Neil comments: “Our paper argues that there are collective and cooperative ways to organise for social justice in our histories which we can learn from to tackle the wicked problems of our day”

The paper is, with publisher permission, adapted from a more extensive journal article, “Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools,” published by the Academy of Management Learning & Education.

Read the full article at: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/the-bluefield-experiment-in-co-op-economics-why-it-matters-for-hbcus-today/

Read Neil's profile here.