I read an interesting article in the Seattle Times this morning, reprinted from the Washington Post. The title in the print paper is less fiery — “Sears catalog opened a door to equality”. I grabbed the title of this entry from the web site — seemed more appropriate given what the author wrote.
The article starts with the news of Monday’s announcement that Sears would file for bankruptcy and close 142 stores. Then...
A lesser-known aspect of Sears’ 125-year history, however, is how the company revolutionized rural black southerners’ shopping patterns in the late 19th century, subverting racial hierarchies by allowing them to make purchases by mail or over the phone and avoid the blatant racism that they faced at small country stores.
“What most people don’t know is just how radical the catalog was in the era of Jim Crow,” Louis Hyman, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, wrote in a Twitter thread that was shared over 7,000 times Monday after the news of Sears’ demise. By allowing African Americans in southern states to avoid price-gouging and condescending treatment at their local stores, he wrote, the catalog “undermined white supremacy in the rural South.”
The rest of the article is a pretty detailed catalogue (heh!) of the humiliations and tribulations of “Buying While Black” for African Americans living in the South. No service until all the white patrons were served, refusing to sell certain goods or higher quality goods even if an AA customer had money in hand (“a shirt good enough for a darky to wear”), limiting or refusing credit to an AA customer that was readily available to a poor white customer, etc.
One other interesting note:
The company has even been credited with contributing to the development of a unique genre of black southern music — the Delta blues. “There was no Delta blues before there were cheap, readily available steel-string guitars,” musician and writer Chris Kjorness wrote in Reason, a libertarian magazine, in 2012. “And those guitars, which transformed American culture, were brought to the boondocks by Sears, Roebuck & Co.” By 1908, anyone could buy a steel-string guitar from the catalog for $1.89, the equivalent of roughly $50 today. It was the cheapest harmony-generating instrument available on the mass market, Kjorness noted.
The whole article is worth a read — and some of it will make your blood boil. Sears doesn’t come out totally innocent — in the South they still had black and white jobs defined by the Jim Crow laws. But both blacks and whites could shop in the Atlanta Sears.