People shut out of mainstream jobs, credit and markets turn to pooling resources and owning businesses together, because sharing costs and risks is how they survive. Every group in history has done this, most of all when it was left out. Enslaved Africans pooled resources from the start because survival depended on it.
When a group's joint economic efforts threaten those in power, opponents answer with violence and economic sabotage: refusing loans, withholding supplies, burning shared stores. So the ventures that last often stay out of sight of mainstream society. That hiding is one reason the history of such efforts is largely forgotten.
Cooperative ownership spreads fastest when ordinary markets fail people. Among Black Americans it peaked during the Great Depression, when need pushed people to form buyers' cooperatives and other shared enterprises.
A single cooperative is fragile, but a linked network can supply what each one lacks: training, development help, finance and social security. Federations of local co-ops and credit unions have lasted for decades even when the government was hostile.
Running shared enterprises builds the organizing skills and leadership that later carry political struggles, including leadership by women. Economic cooperation fed directly into political advocacy, and leaders from the most conservative to the most radical backed it as a path to liberation.