Sears overthrows racial hierarchies – Winnipeg Free Press

The announcement on Monday of Sears bankruptcy and the closure of 142 stores surprised only those following the collapse of the retail giant in recent years. The news nonetheless inspired a wave of nostalgia for a company that was selling a middle-class living ideal to generations of Americans.

One of the lesser-known aspects of Sears' 132-year history, however, is the way in which society revolutionized the shopping habits of southern Blacks in the late 19th century, overthrowing racial hierarchies by allowing them to mail or telephone purchases and the blatant racism they face in small country stores.

"What most people do not know, is how radical the catalog was at the time of Jim Crow," wrote Louis Hyman, an associate professor of history at Cornell University , in a Twitter feed shared more than 7,000 times this Monday awakening the news of the disappearance of Sears. By allowing blacks from southern states to avoid price abuse and patronizing treatment in their local stores, he writes, the catalog "undermines white supremacy in rural southern areas."

As historians of the Jim Crow era have demonstrated, the purchase of everyday household items was often an exercise in humiliation for blacks living in the south. Prior to the advent of the mail-order catalog, black and rural South residents generally had the choice of only shopping at whites-owned general stores – often managed by the owner of the same farm where they worked as sharecroppers. These store owners often figured out what blacks could buy by limiting the credit they were going to give.

While country stores were one of the few places where whites and blacks mingled regularly, shop owners fiercely defended the order of white supremacy by forcing black customers to wait for each customer white be served and forcing them to buy substandard products. "A black man who needed clothes received a shirt" good enough for a black person ", while a black family with minimal supplies could only have the lowest grade of flour," wrote the author. historian Grace Elizabeth Hale in the book Jumpin 'Jim Crow: The South's Civil War Policy on Civil Rights.

In 1894, Sears, Roebuck and Co. began sending 322-page illustrated catalogs. In the previous year, Congress passed the Free Shipping in Rural Areas Act, which allowed the Chicago-based retailer to easily reach rural southern communities. In particular, the company has strived to satisfy its customers with low literacy by adopting a policy that it would execute any order received, regardless of its format.

"So farmers who were once too intimidated to send applications to other suppliers could write on a piece of paper and humbly ask for a pair of size suits," said Bitter Southerner, an online magazine. this summer. "And even if it was written in broken English or almost illegible, the combination would be shipped."

But more importantly, the catalog format allowed for anonymity, ensuring that black and white customers would be treated in the same way.

"This gives South-East African Americans a certain degree of autonomy, of secrecy," told the unofficial Sears historian Jerry Hancock. Stuff You Missed in the class of history podcast in December 2016. "Now they can buy the same thing as anyone else .. And all they have to do is order it from this They do not have to deal with racist dealers in town and that sort of thing. "

Even though white shop owners wanted to do business with black customers, many thought blacks had money. Mamie Fields, a black woman born in South Carolina in 1888, wrote in her memoir: "Some of them thought that people of color should not have anything good, even if they had enough of it. 39, money to buy it.Our people once sent for certain items, so the biscuits would not know what you have at home. "

We even credited the company for having contributed to the development of a unique genre of black music from the southern United States – the blues Delta. "There were no Delta blues before there were cheap and easily available steel string guitars," wrote musician and writer Chris Kjorness reason, a libertarian magazine, in 2012. "And these guitars, which transformed American culture, were brought to the basket by Sears, Roebuck & Co." By 1908, everyone could buy a catalog steel string guitar at a price of 1.89 USD, the equivalent of about 50 USD today. Kjorness noted that it was the cheapest instrument to generate harmony available in the mass market.

There is not enough data available to determine exactly how much black clients have contributed to Sears' bottom line in the Jim Crow years. And historians have noted that buying on catalogs was only an option for blacks who had access to a phone and had enough money to place an order.

– Washington Post