Sears subverted racial hierarchies

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This article was published 20/10/2018 (2829 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Monday’s announcement that Sears would file for bankruptcy and close 142 stores came as little surprise to anyone who has followed the retail giant’s collapse in recent years. Still, the news inspired a wave of nostalgia for a company that sold an ideal of middle-class life to generations of Americans.

A lesser-known aspect of Sears’ 132-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 they faced at small country stores.

“What most people don’t know is just how radical the catalogue 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 more than 7,000 times Monday in the wake of the news of Sears’ demise. By allowing black people in southern states to avoid price-gouging and condescending treatment at their local stores, he wrote, the catalogue “undermined white supremacy in the rural south.”

As historians of the Jim Crow era have documented, purchasing everyday household goods was often an exercise in humiliation for black people living in the south. Before the advent of the mail-order catalogue, rural black southerners typically only had the option of shopping at white-owned general stores — often run by the owner of the same farm where they worked as sharecroppers. Those store owners frequently determined what black people could buy by limiting how much credit they would extend.

While country stores were one of the few places where white and black people routinely mingled, store owners fiercely defended the white supremacist order by making black customers wait until every white customer had been served and forcing them to buy lower-quality goods. “A black man who needed clothing received a shirt ‘good enough for a darky to wear’ while a black family low on provisions could have only the lowest grade of flour,” historian Grace Elizabeth Hale wrote in an essay published in the book Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights.

In 1894, Sears, Roebuck and Co. began sending out 322-page illustrated catalogues. The year before, Congress had passed the Rural Free Delivery Act, making it possible for the Chicago-based retailer to easily reach communities across the rural south. Notably, the company made an effort to accommodate customers who were barely literate, enacting a policy that the company would fill any order it received regardless of the format.

“So, country folks who were once too daunted to send requests to other purveyors could write in on a scrap of paper, asking humbly for a pair of overalls, size large,” Bitter Southerner, an online magazine, explained this summer. “And even if it was written in broken English or nearly illegible, the overalls would be shipped.”

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

“This gives African-Americans in the southeast some degree of autonomy, some degree of secrecy,” unofficial Sears historian Jerry Hancock told the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast in December 2016. “Now they can buy the same thing that anybody else can buy. And all they have to do is order it from this catalogue. They don’t have to deal with racist merchants in town and those types of things.”

Even though white store owners wanted black customers’ business, many were uncomfortable with the idea of black people having money. Mamie Fields, a black woman who was born in segregated South Carolina in 1888, wrote in her memoir: “Some of them did think coloured people oughtn’t to have a certain nice thing, even if they had enough money to buy it. Our people used to send off for certain items. That way, too, the crackers… wouldn’t know what you had in your house.”

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 catalogue for US$1.89, the equivalent of roughly US$50 today. It was the cheapest harmony-generating instrument available on the mass market, Kjorness noted.

There isn’t enough data available to determine exactly how much black customers contributed to Sears’ bottom line during the Jim Crow years. And historians have noted that purchasing from the catalogues was only an option for black people who had access to a phone and enough cash on hand to place an order.

— Washington Post