Helping Themselves

When she started scouting for loans to finance a community-owned supermarket early last year, Harlem's Cora T. Walker could hardly complain about discrimination. White banks, local antipoverty agencies and well-to-do Negroes were equally uninterested. "We had no assets and no balance sheets," she explains, "and my board of directors couldn't give any personal guarantees." But before long, Miss Walker and the 16-member board of the Harlem River Consumers Cooperative found a hidden asset--in the fact that the people they were trying to help were willing to help themselves.

This week, with the backing of some 2 500 Negroes who have invested $152,000 in the project, Walker & Co. will open Harlem's first cooperative super market. Located in Esplanade Gardens Cooperative, a middle-income apartment complex, the moderate-sized (10,000 sq. ft.) store will be the chief market not only for the 1,870-apartment development but also for surrounding tenement blocks. Its key asset, however will be its owner-customers, some of whom were enlisted by teen-agers selling $5 shares. The coop, says Miss Walker, 42, a practicing Harlem attorney, is the first Harlem store in which "the community has a vested interest." Cash Rebate. That interest is green as well as black. The supermarket aims to reward its customers with an annual cash rebate on their purchases (perhaps $50 for every $1,000 worth of goods bought) and, eventually, dividends on their stock. There will be other returns as well. The store promises to create 50 new jobs, outdo local chain stores in offering such "ethnic appeal" items as chitlins and hog maws. Far more important in an area whose residents insist that they are being gouged by white storeowners, the supermarket's prices will reflect the scant buying power of its customers.

The Harlem River group is following a concept long familiar elsewhere, particularly in white rural America, where cooperatives have long supplied services ranging from credit to electric power. Lately, the idea has won enthusiasm in the ghettos. Following last summer's riot, some 50 rudimentary "buying clubs" appeared in Detroit, at first merely to provide food in short supply after existing stores were burned or looted clean. One such venture, called Community Consumer Coop, Inc., has now made plans to open a neighborhood dairy store.

Whimsical Inventory. Many such ventures soon expire from a sad lack of managerial experience. Begun with much enthusiasm three years ago, San Francisco's Hunter's Point Co-op was underfinanced and ill-managed, soon encountered gaps in its shelves as well as in its clientele. Last month Safeway Stores rescued it from near bankruptcy, moved in to revamp its whimsical inventory, which included a $3,000 supply of imported wines. In Los Angeles a similar post-Watts effort called the "Unity Market" is now just a memory. Says Watts's Rev. James Hargett: "It's a bad thing for black people to think they can run a supermarket just on soul."

When soul is combined with business savvy, however, the results can be most rewarding. Manhattan's Morningside Heights Consumers Cooperative, not far from Harlem, has been going strong for nearly a decade. Last year it returned its members, 50% of them Negroes and Puerto Ricans, a 4.8% cash rebate and an astonishing 12% dividend on their $25-a-share stock.

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