Sears' "radical" past: how mail order catalogs have turned Jim Crow's racial hierarchy upside down

Ruth Parrington, Librarian, Arts Department, Chicago Public Library, studies the early Sears Roebuck catalogs from the library collection in this undated photo. (AP)

Columbia Grand Gramophone, announced in a 1902 Sears Roebuck catalog. (Edward Kitch / AP)

Monday, the announcement that Sears would The bankruptcy and closure of 142 stores surprised only those who followed 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.

"What most people do not know, is how radical the catalog was at the time of Jim Crow," Louis Hyman, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, wrote in a Twitter feed that was shared more than 7,000 times Monday following the announcement of Sears' disappearance. By allowing African Americans from the South to avoid price abuse and patronizing treatment in their local stores, wrote, the catalog "undermined white supremacy in the rural south. "

As historians of the Jim Crow era have demonstrated, the purchase of common household items often constituted an exercise in humiliation for South African Americans. Prior to the advent of the mail-order catalog, rural South-Easterners generally had the choice of shopping in wholly owned general stores – often managed by the owner of the same property. farm where they worked as sharecroppers. These store owners often determined what African Americans could buy by limiting the credit they would give.

While country stores were one of the few places where whites and blacks mingled regularly, shop owners fiercely defended the order of the supremacist whites by keeping black customers waiting until they reached the end. all white clients are 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 provisions could only have the lowest grade of flour," wrote the author. Grace Elizabeth Hale historian in "Jumpin 'Jim Crow: Southern Politics of Civil War Civil Rights. "

In 1894, Sears, Roebuck and Co. began sending 322-page illustrated catalogs. In the previous year, Congress passed the Free Rural Delivery 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 make requests to other suppliers could write on a piece of paper and humbly ask for a pair of size suits," said Bitter Southerner 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.

"It gives South-East African Americans some autonomy, Jerry Hancock, an unofficial Sears historian, told the December 2016 Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast. "They can now buy what everyone can buy. And all they have to do is order it from this catalog. They do not have to deal with racist merchants in the city and that sort of thing. "

Although white shop owners wanted to do business with black customers, many feared blacks would have 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 money to buy it. Our people had the habit of sending for certain items. In this way too, the crackers. . . do not know what you have at home. "

The company has even been credited for contributing to the development of a unique genre of Southern black music: the blues Delta.. "There were no Delta blues before there were cheap and easily available steel string guitars," wrote musician and writer Chris Kjorness in Reason, a libertarian magazine, in 2012. "And these guitars, which transformed American culture, were brought to fashion. By Sears, Roebuck & Co. By 1908, everyone could buy a catalog steel string guitar at $ 1.89, or about the equivalent of $ 50 today. It is the cheapest instrument to generate harmony available in the mass market, noted Kjorness.

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

Nevertheless, Southern merchants felt clearly threatened by the competition from the mail-order department stores: as the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs made their way into more and more homes, local traders were starting to circulate rumors that companies are run by black men. , of course, was that these fellows would not have the means to show their faces as retailers, "wrote Gordon Lee Weil in his 1977 story," Sears, Roebuck, USA.

At the turn of the century, some merchants even encouraged people to bring their catalogs for Saturday night bonfires and offered bonuses of up to $ 50 for those who gathered the most "Wish Books". , wrote historians Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen in "Canals of Desire: Mass Images and Shaping the American Consciousness." In response, Sears published photos of its founders to prove they were white, while Ward offered a reward of $ 100 in exchange for the name of the person who had started the rumor that he mixed black and white parentage.

Meanwhile, in the following decades, Julius Rosenwald, who had become co-owner of the company after Alvah Roebuck's sale in 1895, became a well-known philanthropist of the black community. He donated $ 4.3 million – the equivalent of more than $ 75 million today – to open nearly 5,000 "Rosenwald Schools" in the rural south between 1912 and 1932 , the year of his death.

"These schools were in very, very rural areas, where many African-American children were not going to school. If they went to school, they would go to a very dilapidated building, "told the Washington Post in 2015 Stephanie Deutsch, a writer, who published a book on the history of schools. Schools were new and modern, with large windows, and plenty of light flowing into them. They felt special because they were new and that they were theirs.

Although most schools in Rosenwald closed after Brown v. Board of Education To end the segregation, Karen Heller of The Post newspaper reported in 2015 that one in three Black children in the South attended a school in Rosenwald in the 1930s. Among the notable alumni of this school is the poet Maya Angelou and the representative John Lewis (D-Ga). .)

Rosenwald, son of German Jewish immigrants, became a friend of Booker T. Washington and served on the board of the Tuskegee Institute. He has also contributed to the funding of YMCAs and Black YWCAs, and provided financial support to black artists and writers, including opera singer Marian Anderson, poet Langston Hughes, photographer Gordon Parks, and filmmaker. writer James Baldwin.

Sears has gone so far to reverse race norms. Until the mid-twentieth century, the company was following Jim Crow's laws in its Atlanta department store, Bitter Southerner said, meaning black employees could only work in warehouse positions, concierge and catering. Nevertheless, the company allowed Blacks and Whites to shop in this location, which was not the case for other stores in the area at the time.

And for much of US history, the Sears catalog offered black consumers something they could not find anywhere else: dignity.

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