Memphis’ Cxffeeblack has announced a partnership with COMOCO Cotton, a sustainable textile company, to release a limited-edition T-shirt with the phrase “God Don’t Make No Junk. Cxffee Don’t Need No Cream” printed across the front. This partnership, in turn, has created what they say is the world’s first Black-owned cotton supply chain.
“This collaboration is about more than a product. It’s about shifting the narrative — reclaiming what was once stolen and turning it into a tool for our collective liberation,” Bartholomew Jones, hip-hop artist, educator, and co-founder of Cxffeeblack, said in a press release.
“Coffee’s a $465 billion industry, and it’s the most traded good for third-world countries after oil and is the most drunk liquid on the planet after water,” Jones said in a previous interview with the Flyer. “Amidst all of those things, the people who discovered coffee, which are people in Africa, receive less than 1 percent of that revenue.”
Cotton, likewise, is another historically charged material for its role in slavery and sharecropping. “COMOCO is helping to reframe that narrative and reclaim cotton as a source of pride, empowerment, and prosperity,” its website reads, as the business works exclusively with Black farmers to address “the historical and ongoing marginalization of Black farmers and farms.”
In this way, as the press release states, “Through this partnership, coffee and cotton, once tools of oppression, are transformed into symbols of resilience and creativity, owned and driven by Black hands.”
The cotton T-shirts are dyed with the coffee company’s Guji Mane, sourced directly from Ethiopian farms. These shirts are limited only to those who invest or return to invest in Cxffeeblack’s WeFunder, the goal of which is to build a permanent headquarters as a community space and to establish the world’s first all-Black coffee supply chain connecting Africa to Memphis. Recently, the company has celebrated passing its halfway point to $1.2 million on capital raised.
“Investing in this collaboration means investing in a future where Black ownership is not the exception — it’s the standard,” Stephen Satterfield, owner of COMOCO Cotton and host of Netflix’s High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America. (Satterfield met Jones when he visited Cxffeeblack’s shop, the Anti Gentrification Cxffee Club, during a stay in Memphis. Ever since, Satterfield has supported the Memphis-based company.)
“Black creativity is the foundation of so many industries, yet we rarely own the means of production,” Jones said. “This collaboration proves that we don’t have to ask for a seat at the table — we can build our own, from the soil up.”