[Editor's note: a Celebration of Life was held recently for Charles O. Prejean, founding charter member and first Executive Director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, serving from 1967 to 1985. The following obituary first appeared in the FSC/LAF newsletter of August 21, 2025.]
Charles was born on May 6, 1941, in Lafayette, Louisiana, the third of seven children of Oran and Edolia Prejean. The grandson of sharecroppers, he grew up in the segregated, low-income society of 1940s and 1950s Louisiana. He attended Catholic primary and secondary schools before entering the Society of the Divine Word Seminary in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, with the intention of becoming a priest. Guided by faith, he ultimately discerned that he could serve more effectively as a layperson, working to improve the conditions of Black people and their communities. He went on to complete his formal education, earning a degree from the University of Southwest Louisiana in Lafayette.
Charles worked closely with Father Albert J. McKnight, CSSP, a Black Catholic priest from Brooklyn, NY, who pastored Black churches in southwest Louisiana, including St. Paul’s, Charles’ home church in Lafayette. Beginning as a teenager and continuing through seminary and college, Charles volunteered with Father McKnight in adult literacy classes and cooperative business development. He later became the first manager of the Southern Consumers Cooperative, a holding company that included a bakery, a statewide loan company, work with sweet potato farmers, and other cooperative enterprises.
With Father McKnight, his younger brother Fred, and two others, Charles attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He said the historic civil rights demonstration in the nation’s capital changed the trajectory of his life, inspiring him to dedicate himself fully to uplifting the Black community.
In 1966, Charles, Father McKnight, Carol Prejean, and John Zippert convened a series of meetings, supported by the Southern Regional Council, the American Friends Service Committee, and others, to bring together cooperative and credit union leaders from Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana. These leaders had been organizing family farmers and other low-income people through the civil rights movement in pursuit of economic justice.
Out of these meetings came the Southern Cooperative Development Program (SCDP), a Ford Foundation–funded effort to expand cooperative development in four Southern states, and the plan to organize the Federation of Southern Cooperatives as a regional voice for the cooperative movement that grew out of the civil rights struggle.
A meeting was held in the Spring of 1967 of 22 cooperatives and credit unions to form the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. Charles Prejean was the Chairperson of the organizing board. The Board received a small start-up grant of $35,000 from the Cooperative League of the USA and other small foundation grants and hired a Georgia Extension Agent to become its first Executive Director. This person declined the position and the Federation’s Board chose Charles Prejean to be the organization's first Executive Director.
Charles, by then married to Carmen Dauphin Prejean, moved with their three children to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1968 to open the Federation’s first office at 52 Fairlie Street. In his first three years, he secured major grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the federal anti-poverty agency. He hired the Federation’s initial staff, including outreach workers, and grew membership to more than 75 cooperatives and credit unions across the South.
Working alongside the SCDP staff in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana, Charles began searching for a site in the South to establish the Federation’s central training and research facilities. He considered several properties in Mississippi and Georgia. At the same time, the Federation/SCDP staff was assisting the Panola Land Buyers Association (PLBA)—a group of evicted tenant farmers from plantations in northern Sumter County, Alabama—in securing land for farming and housing. In September 1970, after a long legal battle, the PLBA purchased three tracts of land totaling 1,164 acres in Sumter County. On behalf of the Federation, Charles negotiated an agreement with the PLBA to help pay for the land in exchange for title to Tract I—374 acres—where the Federation would establish its Rural Training and Research Center.
In 1971, Charles relocated the Federation’s major technical and organizing staff to 14 trailers on the land, located between Epes and Gainesville in Sumter County, the westernmost county of Alabama’s Black Belt. He and his young family also moved to the Federation's Rural Training & Research Center (RTRC), where he personally oversaw the construction and development of its facilities and programs.
In 1985, he helped supervise and support the Federation of Southern Cooperatives merger with the Emergency Land Fund (ELF) to form the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/ Land Assistance Fund. Both Charles and Joe Brooks, Executive Director of the ELF resigned to pursue other career opportunities. Ralph Paige became Executive Director in 1985 and served until 2015, when the current director, Cornelius Blanding, was elevated by the Board to the Executive Director’s position.
After leaving the Federation, Prejean worked in academia at Notre Dame and Xavier Universities. Later, he was selected by Bishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta to be the head of Black Ministries in the Catholic Diocese of Atlanta, Georgia.
In 2022, Charles organized a group of retired former staff to form a committee tasked with developing the Federation’s Memorial Legacy Project (MLP), designed to honor the grassroots community leaders who shaped and led the Federation during its first fifty years. Working alongside FSC/LAF Executive Director, Cornelius Blanding, and other current staff, the MLP Committee has developed the concept of a living memorial on the Federation RTRC land in Sumter County.
The work of MLP underscores the efficacy of cooperative economic development and its grassroots leaders. The Memorial Project will be at the FSC/LAF's Rural Research and Training Center, Epes, Alabama.
The MLP's design plan includes multiple edifices and living structures, examples of which are a strategically positioned Memorial Wall; Gateways to Fruit and Pecan Trees; Flower Gardens in selected locations; Walkways to reflective points, such as Dedicated Fountains, Benches, Plaques, Abstract Artistic and Statuary Renderings, and Gazebos.
It is our hope this endeavor, which was very dear to Charles, will also serve as an inspiration for others, especially young people, to follow in the footsteps of the Federation’s grassroots founders and those who came behind them.
Charles is survived by his wife, Carmen, three children, Carla, Chuck, and Charlotte, as well as five grandchildren: three sisters and numerous other relatives, friends, and co-workers.
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