Albert J. "Al" McKnight, CsSp (August 18, 1927 – April 17, 2016) was an author, activist, Black Catholic priest and member of the Spiritans known for his advocacy for Black liberation and cooperative economics.
He was the principal organizer of the Southern Cooperative Development Fund (SCDF), Southern Development Foundation (SDF), and the Southern Consumers Cooperative (SCC). In 1968, Ebony magazine described him as having staged "a peaceful economic revolution."
Biography
Early life and education
Born in Brooklyn on August 18, 1927, to Albert and Althea Holmes McKnight, the younger McKnight converted to Catholicism as a child, with his mother being a Methodist and his father a lapsed Catholic. He later entered the Congregation of the Holy Spirit in the 1940s as one of the nation's earliest Black Catholic male religious. He professed first vows at the Holy Ghost Novitiate in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and was ordained to the priesthood on June 6, 1952, at St Mary's (Ferndale) Seminary in Norwalk, Connecticut.
Priesthood
His first parish assignment was at St Paul Catholic Church in Kaplan, Louisiana, where he observed rampant illiteracy and implemented counteractive measures. He then traveled to Nova Scotia in 1960 to attend classes on co-operative economics at the Coady Institute. Subsequently, he founded the Southern Consumers Cooperative (SCC), a network of Southern Black farmers.
Holy Ghost Catholic Church
After returning to Kaplan, McKnight served at various other parishes before being assigned to Holy Ghost Catholic Church in Opelousas, Louisiana, where he gained considerable fame as the SCC grew. Soon other developments emerged, including the Acadian Delight cooperative bakery, which received a $25,000 loan from President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty program. An ardent activist, McKnight also attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.
At Holy Ghost, McKnight also became known for his religious activism, emerging as a notable advocate of the Black Catholic Movement. He played a pivotal role as a founding member of the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus (in which he would serve as the first executive director). He began a program of Black inculturation at Holy Ghost, including the removal of Eurocentric images and music, and replacing them with Black saints, gospel music, and the Black preaching idiom. He also helped develop the NBCCC's founding manifesto, which famously claimed that "The Catholic Church in the U.S. is primarily a White, racist institution.” He would later take part in the NBCCC's agitations for an African-American Catholic rite.
Cooperative economics
Meanwhile, he created the Southern Cooperative Education Fund (SCEF), which in 1967 received a half a million dollars to spread cooperative economics through the South. His new Southern Cooperative Development Fund (SCDF) received another half-million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation in 1969, which McKnight helped turn into a $30M operation with various subsidiary coops."Over a 25-year period, [McKnight] was in the vanguard of organizing 75 cooperatives, credit unions and minority businesses across the Southern United States."McKnight was profiled in Ebony magazine in 1968, as he began advocating not only for economic uplift but political action as well. At the time, few African Americans had ever run for office, and McKnight became one of the first himself while encouraging others to also start their own campaigns. His activism against racism and economic oppression resulted in at least two arrests.
In 1969, McKnight and his collaborators received an invitation from Histadrut, a labor organization in Israel, to come observe their kibbutzes communities and collectivized farms (moshavim). McKnight, upon his return to the States, began mentoring a young Ronald Mason Jr., who would later go on to practice law and head a number of Black universities. With McKnight, he headed a number of subsidiaries within the larger Southern coop movement established by McKnight—including the new collective farms created under the Israeli model.
The farms would not survive long as a unified operation, due to various disputes. Likewise, several of the cooperative operations would not last beyond McKnight's period of direct influence. Controversy concerning how to spend grant funds split the leadership of the SCDF in the 1970s, and McKnight left coop activity entirely for a number of years thereafter.