Toward Wal-Mart

The book concludes with an examination of the relocation of department stores to suburban shopping centers and the Sears, Roebuck, and Company affirmative action cases. Mass suburbanization, the rise of discount retailers such as Kmart and Wal-Mart, and urban decay transformed department stores. Black workers found that the gains they had made in downtown department stores had virtually disappeared as department stores followed their preferred clientele—the white middle class—to the suburbs. Here, stores were able to return to their former racial practices in spaces that were inaccessible via public transportation, deemed private property, and prohibited civil rights demonstrations. The Sears cases thus reveal the ways that the department store movement modified its tactics, approaches, and strategies. These cases also exposed the industry’s ongoing transformations, ones that revolutionized, or rather diminished, the status of retail work and department stores, and facilitated the reconsolidation of racial discrimination.

The Department Store Movement in the Postwar Era

Chapter 4 considers the department store movement and the birth of a modern middle-class consciousness in the 1940s and 1950s. Department stores remained key battlegrounds and took on greater significance as black purchasing power had reached an unprecedented level of $8-9 million by 1947 and the relationship between consumption and citizenship had changed. For the most part, the department store movement remained a fight for jobs in the immediate postwar era, taking on consumer issues as it saw fit. This phase of the movement marked a period of preliminary testing that would eventually lead to militant protests in the 1950s and 1960s. Under the leadership of the National Urban League (NUL) and American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the movement relied on intercultural education and moral exhortations. Emblematic of racial liberalism and the early civil rights movement, the NUL and AFSC believed that if respectable blacks and white community leaders simply asked store officials to hire African Americans in sales and clerical, they would, and after that “their attitude about integrated workplaces and African Americans generally would change,” helping them “topple barriers in other industries and locations.”

Before Montgomery

Chapter 2 examines the rise of the department store movement in the urban North and Midwest. It begins with a look into the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” movement. The “Don’t Buy” movement built on an earlier tradition of black consumer protests and leveraged black purchasing power to secure better jobs in sales and office work in white-owned business located in urban black neighborhoods. The department store movement was an outgrowth of this Depression-era campaign. Shaped by New Deal and wartime programs, the department store movement built on the tactics, goals, and momentum of its predecessor but targeted department stores exclusively. These stores were now not only symbols of American democracy and prosperity but also inherently public spaces where all the races, gender, and classes might confront each other daily, and consequently where conflict and eventual resolution would be most visible.

Epilogue

The department store movement succeeded in opening this world to African Americans and provided them with the means with which to make claims to middle-class citizenship, but it certainly did not foresee the dramatic decline of these retail institutions. The struggle for racial equity in work and consumption, thus, continues. Racial discrimination in the retail industry persists in ways that are consistent with early forms of discrimination—not hiring African Americans in skilled and status positions, and limited black consumers’ mobility in and access to retail institutions. Discrimination is also shaped by and reflective of the changing nature of American retailing, employment, and consumption in the twenty-first century—in that African Americans are hired in sales vis-à-vis cashiering and denied managerial, supervisory, and executive positions.

Worker-Consumer Alliances and the Modern Black Middle Class, 1951–1970

The movement in southern cities is the subject of chapter 5. It explores black worker-consumer alliances (built on “linked fate”) in sit-in demonstrations and their utility in helping black southerners claim middle-class citizenship during the civil rights movement. From Washington, D.C., to Charlotte to Nashville, African Americans organized widely publicized sit-ins and picket lines to force the desegregation of public accommodations and democratization of the transitional nature of customer-business interactions. But African Americans had other goals. What began as protests aimed at restructuring the physical space of the public sphere and procuring the right to experience the indulgences of customer service often grew into organized endeavors to dismantle the formidable barriers to black economic emancipation. These endeavors maintained a broad understanding of the black community’s shared interests and involved challenging segregation and discrimination in the marketplace on behalf of black customers and workers.

To All Store and Office Workers … Negro and White!

The exceptionality of retail unions governing Macy’s Herald Square in New York City and South Center Department Store in Chicago in advancing black labor and civil rights is the subject of chapter three. New York and Chicago locals successfully linked worker and consumer rights and improved African Americans’ social and economic conditions, even propelling some of them into the middle class. Also, in acting as both labor and civil rights organizations, these unions expanded views on fair employment in this industry beyond bread-and-butter issues and promoted equal employment and promotion. These unions point to the nature and direction of the black freedom struggle, albeit without the presence of strong unionism.

Race and Class Identities in Early American Department Stores

An exploration of the racial and class dimensions of early American department stores is provided in this chapter. It reveals why these retail institutions became prime locations for protesting and claiming civil rights. Early American department stores operated under the principle of free entry and browsing—a principle that helped usher in a new conception of American democracy that was intricately tied to the practices of consumption that the department store fostered. Stores, however, also conformed to and endorsed aspects of Jim Crow (including notions of racial order and purity): many stores received African Americans under the principle of free entry and browsing but then constrained their movement and participation in this space; and stores hired blacks as maintenance and stockroom workers, elevator operators, porters, and maids—all invisible from the salesroom floor—but barred them from white-collar staff positions in sales, clerical, and management. The racialized democracy of the department store shaped the ways that race and class were imagined and employed to create both worker and consumer identities, making department stores an epitome of racial discrimination and thus an ideal site to challenge racial discrimination.

Introduction

The five-decade department store movement was contemporaneous with both the black labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Therefore, it provides a privileged perspective on these two movements and their interrelationships. The department store movement helped dismantle racialized patterns of labor and consumption and, in the process, facilitated the emergence of a modern black middle class. This new black middle class and those aspiring to ideal middle-class status would profoundly shape the course of the civil rights movement. The department store movement reveals aspects of the black middle class that might enhance our understanding of the politics of the black freedom movement in the twentieth century, not least of which is why its targets were so often sites of consumption.