Cooperative Heritage Communities: A Framework for Community-Led Preservation in Rural Black America

Abstract

Across the United States, African American communities are celebrated in heritage interpretation while simultaneously facing displacement, population decline, and institutional erosion. Preservation policy measures success through heritage tourism revenue, property values, and architectural integrity—metrics that rarely translate into community stability or descendant empowerment. This study argues that heritage preservation is incomplete without community survival and introduces Cooperative Heritage Communities (CHCs) as a framework for aligning cultural stewardship with community well-being.

CHCs are not organizations to build or programs to fund—they are a mindset and practice grounded in principles of shared experience, collective ownership, democratic governance, community resource building, equity and justice orientation, and shared language and trust. Drawing on African American traditions of mutual aid, collective ownership, and democratic governance, the CHC framework guides communities in recognizing their existing heritage work as cooperative practice and provides tools to formalize, strengthen, and sustain it. Through this lens, communities can pool resources for cemetery restoration, stabilize family land through revolving funds, establish community-sanctioned development agreements, and build intergenerational preservation capacity by organizing what already exists around principles of cooperation and shared stewardship.

This framework emerges from moral, structural, and policy challenges observed on Maryland's Eastern Shore, by the author—challenges that mirror national trends: rural Black population decline, fragile community institutions, uneven development pressures, heirs' property vulnerabilities, and preservation systems that privilege architectural significance while overlooking cultural and cooperative significance. Through PESTLE analysis of preservation's external forces, case studies of cooperative heritage practice, and a scenario-building exercise set in a rural Black settlement, this study demonstrates how cooperative economics and heritage communities of practice converge to create sustainable, justice-oriented preservation models.

The study contributes a replicable framework grounded in theory and practice, offering preservationists, community organizers, and policymakers a pathway to reorient heritage work from extractive storytelling toward community-centered stewardship. In rural Black communities where land, memory, and belonging are inseparable, CHCs offer a way to ensure that preservation sustains not only sites and stories, but the people, places, and futures those sites represent. The study culminates in a scenario set in Butlertown, Maryland, demonstrating how CHC principles translate into practice through a community-governed revolving fund that prevents land loss and maintains cultural continuity.

Future research should test CHC implementation across diverse geographic and cultural contexts while developing metrics that center community-defined measures of preservation success.