20 Clever Ways People Survived History’s Hardest Times

During Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow fever epidemic, Dr. Benjamin Rush mistakenly believed that Black Philadelphians were naturally immune to the disease and asked Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, leaders of the Free African Society, for help caring for yellow fever patients. Volunteers from the Free African Society cared for the sick and buried the deceased victims of the plague, free of charge. Sadly, Rush couldn’t have been more wrong about that supposed immunity. Black caregivers, including many volunteers, died at the same rate as white residents, with over 240 Black deaths recorded. After publisher Mathew Carey accused Black volunteers of price-gouging during the epidemic, Allen and Jones published a detailed defense refuting the accusation.

Beginning in 1932, the Farmers’ Holiday Association, organized by Milo Reno, staged standoffs at foreclosure auctions in 15 states to help struggling farmers keep their property. More than 70 penny auctions have been documented. At these events, large, intimidating crowds of farmers would threaten, and occasionally use, force to scare off any outside bidders. They would bid pennies for land, livestock, and equipment, then return it all to the original owner. Basically, they rigged the auction in their neighbors’ favor! Once in Le Mars, Iowa, however, a crowd went much further and assaulted the judge.

When a bailiff threw an evicted family’s possessions onto the sidewalk, a neighborhood signal system alerted hundreds of neighbors, who showed up and carried the belongings right back inside. Throughout 1931, Chicago’s Unemployed Councils coordinated these signals to respond to the thousands of police evictions on the South Side. Talk about neighbors having your back! On August 3, after police killed three Black demonstrators during a protest on Dearborn Street, Mayor Anton Cermak declared a temporary moratorium on evictions.

In 1935, the federal government built the Arvin Federal Camp, aka Weedpatch Camp, in Kern County, California, for Dust Bowl migrants. The residents numbered from 300 to 500 at any given time, and the stay cost 10 cents a day or work equivalent. Residents elected their Community Council, which made the rules, maintained sanitation, organized childcare and a library, and held dances every week. Although it was federal property, they effectively ran the place.

The Detroit Housewives’ League, founded on June 10, 1930, by Fannie Peck, encouraged Black women in Detroit to use their purchasing power as an economic weapon. Under the slogan “Don’t Shop Where You Can’t Work,” League members directed their consumer dollars to firms that employed African Americans. By 1935, the League had 10,000 members. This ultimately forced Detroit dairies, meatpackers, and retailers to hire Black workers as managers and clerks.

Though his followers saw Father Divine as the second coming of Christ, the religious movement he led, known as the Peace Mission, was also a working economy. The Peace Mission maintained over 150 desegregated communal centers, called “Heavens,” mostly located in Harlem. The centers provided clean living conditions and offered hearty meals for 15 cents or even free. And they weren’t just feeding people! Unemployed residents also found work in the movement’s cooperatively owned grocery stores, barbershops, and coal yards.

At the height of bootleg coal mining’s popularity during the Depression, an estimated $30 million of illegally mined coal was sold annually. Jobless miners would organize into teams of three to five and mine anthracite from companies’ now-shuttered lands, dividing all of the profits equally. In some eastern Pennsylvania towns, joblessness approached 50%. In sympathy for the miners, local sheriffs and juries were loath to convict.

In 1892, eleven Jewish immigrants banded together in New York and created a loan society with $95. The society, which still operates today, has a repayment rate of over 98%. Operating under biblical principles that prohibit charging interest on loans to those in need, the society has seen its initial $95 circulate over generations. In exchange for loans, borrowers, specifically peddlers, artisans, and families short of rent, don’t offer tangible collateral but instead provide two co-signers from the community.

About 80 percent of patrons paid the 30-cent admission fee for the Barter Theatre, started by actor Robert Porterfield on June 10, 1933, in Abingdon, Virginia, with milk, livestock, or crops. The produce and animals kept the troupe of 20 actors alive that summer, and the theater was associated with the saying “Ham for Hamlet.”

Mexican-Americans, segregated under the “Juan Crow” system, formed mutual aid societies, known as sociedades mutualistas, across the Southwest in order to access financial benefits that were unattainable from banks or government programs. La Alianza Hispano-Americana, for example, provided medical benefits for sickness, funeral expenses, low-interest loans, legal defense to fight wrongful deportation, and Spanish-language libraries. The funds for these services came from small monthly dues from members.

During the depression following the Panic of 1893, Detroit Mayor Hazen Pingree obtained empty plots, seeds, and tools for the unemployed to raise their own food. These urban gardens fed 8,000 to 9,000 people at minimal public expense. In 1894, 945 families farmed half-acre plots; in 1895 and 1896, this number increased to approximately 1,500 to 1,700 families.

George Schuyler and Ella Baker founded the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League in New York City in December 1930 to bring young African Americans together in consumer cooperatives, where members could pool their buying power, and, in doing so, promote economic self-sufficiency while training future organizers. As national director, Baker ran buying clubs, cooperative grocery stores, and milk distribution programs through the League.

In June 1908, Lugenia Burns Hope, after learning of the death of a neighbor who did not receive medical care, formed the Neighborhood Union. They divided Atlanta’s Black neighborhoods into districts and conducted house surveys. The Neighborhood Union built playgrounds, lobbied the city for better schools and sanitation, and opened Atlanta’s first black health centers. By the Depression, its clinics had served more than 4,000 patients.

In July 1931, West Seattle labor activists formed the Unemployed Citizens’ League to demand public relief for people without work. At its height in 1932, the organization counted 20,000 to 40,000 members throughout King County. It also organized a mutual aid and labor barter system: jobless members harvested unmarketable produce on Japanese-American farms in exchange for a share of the harvest. Other activities included shoe repair shops and firewood chopping. When money was scarce, labor became its own kind of currency.

By the spring of 1932, there were 45 units of the Unemployed Cooperative Relief Organization in Los Angeles County providing food, clothing, and medical care to approximately 150,000 residents, all without government funding. The organization began when an unemployed veteran in Compton traded his labor for surplus crops, eventually forming a cooperative. Members worked two days a week to raise food, operated a warehouse, and ran repair shops.

Through St. Francis Xavier University, Father Moses Coady and Father Jimmy Tompkins organized impoverished fishers, farmers, and miners in Nova Scotia into local study clubs. By 1939, the clubs had developed more than 150 community-owned businesses in Maritime Canada, including credit unions, cooperative lobster plants, and retail stores.

In tenement slums, contaminated raw milk contributed to infant mortality rates approaching one in four before a child’s first birthday. Nathan Straus, co-owner of Macy’s, paid for a pasteurization lab and started his first milk depot on New York’s Lower East Side in 1893, offering milk for a cent a glass. By 1920, the pasteurized milk program had 297 stations in 36 cities. Combined with basic sanitation systems in cities, it also helped lower the infant mortality rate.

In December 1930, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr. pledged four months of his salary to fund relief programs at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where he served as pastor. The church provided a free soup kitchen, a day nursery for working mothers, an employment bureau, and an adult education school, which had 2,000 students by 1935. Four months of his own salary ended up supporting a whole network of help for the community.

Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started the Catholic Worker on May 1, 1933. It started as a one-cent newspaper and a network of “Houses of Hospitality,” which were communal houses where volunteers lived alongside the homeless in New York’s tenement districts, providing them with free beds, clothing, and food, with no moral or religious conditions. During the Depression, the movement grew across North America, operating without any government funding.

Bundles for Britain was started by a New Yorker by the name of Natalie Wales Latham in early 1940 as a small circle of volunteers who knitted for British civilians suffering through the Blitz. It evolved into a national organization before the U.S. entered the war. By late 1941, there were 975 chapters and nearly one million volunteers, mostly women, knitting garments, assembling field kitchens, cots, surgical kits, and ambulances to be shipped overseas.

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