Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools

Abstract

Race matters and racism still exists. However, although growing critical scholarship has recently questioned business schools’ management research and teaching practices, both the historical trajectories of Black Business schools and the legacy of the African American academics who shaped them remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we address this intellectual lacuna by providing a critical history of experiential business teaching at the Department of Business Administration at Bluefield Colored Institute. Building on insights from Critical Race Theory (CRT), we reconstruct how management education at Bluefield during the 1920s-1930s was influenced by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois’ pioneering ideas and Prof. W. C. Matney’s practical experiments on economic cooperation. We then consider the relevance of cooperative economics and business education as well as experiential teaching to modern Black business schools, contributing to debates on both curriculum reform and how mono-cultural histories of management constrain present and future developments.