As We Say Goodbye to Sears, Don’t Forget All They Did to Fight Jim Crow
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty
Sears is filing for bankruptcy this week, and most of us millennials likely saw the news and shrugged our shoulders, as it’s simply another data point in the death of retail. Of course, Sears is going out of business. We don’t need its array of products anymore, that’s what the internet is for. That said, the revolutionary freedom brought to our fingertips by the internet is actually just following the lead of the Sears catalog, and it was a major factor in African Americans gaining a measure of independence from the Jim Crow south, as Louis Hyman, Associate Professor of History at Cornell and the Director of the Institute for Workplace Studies, detailed on Twitter last night.
Every time a black southerner went to the local store they were confronted with forced deference to white customers who would be served first.
— Louis Hyman (@louishyman) October 15, 2018
The stores were not self-service, so the black customers would have to wait. And then would have to ask the proprietor to give them goods (often on credit because…sharecropping). The landlord often owned the store. In every way shopping reinforced hierarchy. Until #Sears
— Louis Hyman (@louishyman) October 15, 2018
Southern storekeepers fought back. They organized catalogue bonfires in the street.
— Louis Hyman (@louishyman) October 15, 2018