Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement
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Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement

Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s

Traci Parker

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eBook - ePub

Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement

Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s

Traci Parker

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About This Book

In this book, Traci Parker examines the movement to racially integrate white-collar work and consumption in American department stores, and broadens our understanding of historical transformations in African American class and labor formation. Built on the goals, organization, and momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom in the mid-twentieth century. Sponsoring lunch counter sit-ins and protests in the 1950s and 1960s, and challenging discrimination in the courts in the 1970s, this movement ended in the early 1980s with the conclusion of the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. affirmative action cases and the transformation and consolidation of American department stores. In documenting the experiences of African American workers and consumers during this era, Parker highlights the department store as a key site for the inception of a modern black middle class, and demonstrates the ways that both work and consumption were battlegrounds for civil rights.

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1 Race and Class Identities in Early American Department Stores
It, the 1927 silent film based on Elinor Glyn’s popularization of the terms “it” and “it girl,” tells the story of Betty Lou Spence, a department store salesgirl, and her “romantic pursuit” of the store’s new owner, Cyrus Waltham. The plot centers on a predictable “class-crossed romance”; yet the film, itself, provides visual, albeit fictionalized, evidence of department store culture in the early twentieth century. It opens with a series of simple, illustrative shots of the fictional department store Waltham’s, which closely resembles Macy’s Herald Square in New York City. The “establishing shot” focuses on “a sign, on top of a massive brick building, that reads: ‘Waltham’s, World’s Largest Store.’ ” “The camera pans down to a view of [a] bustling street,” with customers hurriedly entering and exiting the store, and then tracks inside Waltham’s to reveal an even busier, glitzy palace of consumption.1 On the floor are white middle-class male and female customers dressed in their finest clothes. Some are wandering the aisles, surveying and desiring not simply the store’s dazzling goods but also the luxurious lifestyle promised to those who purchase this merchandise. Other customers are purchasing these coveted goods from white working-class saleswomen, who are plainly dressed compared with their middle-class customers. Saleswomen stand behind glass counters assisting swarms of patrons, selling and arranging merchandise, and gossiping with their coworkers about their new, handsome boss. Concurrently, male managers pace the floor observing, and occasionally sexually appraising, the saleswomen.2
At the time of It’s release, the department store was a popular haven of luxury and amenity for white middle-class women and the uncontested leading American retailer for nearly forty years—making it a logical choice to set a Cinderella tale. Much of its success lay in store merchants’ and commercial impresarios’ transformation of dry goods stores into palaces of consumption.3 Architects of this new system of retailing—men such as Alexander T. Stewart, Rowland H. Macy, John Wanamaker, and Marshall Field—established institutions that epitomized urban affluence and appealed to middle-class women, many of whom controlled their family’s disposable income and handled the consumption needs of their household. Retailers erected stores of unprecedented size and opulence and confronted customers with both an astounding array of high-quality, stylish merchandise and lavish services that enticed customers to buy much more than the essentials (figures 1 and 2). They mastered the art of creating and satisfying consumers’ personal desires and indoctrinating them with the belief that an urban bourgeois lifestyle could be realized and flaunted through shopping. By the 1910s and 1920s, the department store thus had become an arbiter of middle-class life and aspirations as well as an instrument of social mobility and maintenance.
Although eager to attract the lucrative trade of the middle and upper classes, the department store welcomed all visitors. Stores operated under the principle of free entry and browsing—the right to look around the store without the obligation to buy. This principle helped usher in a new conception of American democracy that was intricately tied to the practices of consumption that the department store fostered. According to the historian William Leach, this democracy had two sides. First, it stressed the diffusion of comfort and prosperity as the centerpiece of the American experience and identity. And second, it championed the democratization of desire, “or, more precisely, equal rights to desire the same goods and to enter the same world of comfort and luxury.”4 Under this market notion of democracy, white people from different classes—workers and consumers, native-born and immigrant, proletarians and the bourgeoisie—met, mingled, shared similar experiences, and, in the process, forged a common sense of racial and class identity. A woman from the humblest of backgrounds could browse the aisles alongside a woman from high society. Of course, these women were not greeted with the same customer service nor were their purchases equally valued, but they had equal opportunity to look and desire, if not buy, the goods on offer.
Not everyone, however, could look around and access the store equally. Even as the democracy of the department store was open to the broad participation of whites, it conformed to and endorsed notions of racial order and purity. The store, as illustrated in the opening scenes of It, was a “fairyland of whiteness,” where white consumers were peddled the good life by a genteel and ambitious, exclusively white selling staff.5 Managers feared that any noticeable presence of African Americans or any perception of racial equality would upset the dream world designed for the white middle class and those whites aspiring to join it. But rather than brand themselves as “white only” and deny blacks access, like other public accommodations and workplaces of this era, many stores received African Americans under the principle of free entry and browsing but then constrained their movement and participation in this space. Stores hired them only 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. Black customers were welcome to spend their money on material goods in many stores but were frequently ignored and underserved. They were refused service at eateries and beauty shops, prohibited from trying on and returning clothes, and denied credit. Some stores, especially those in border and southern cities, forbade black patronage entirely or often on a whim, while others confined them to bargain basements. This racial order remained intact until challenged by department store campaigns that began in the late 1930s and continued through the late twentieth century. Before those campaigns, 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 the department store an epitome of racial discrimination and thus an ideal site to challenge racial discrimination.
FIGURE 1 Macy’s, New York, N.Y., 1908. Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-det-4a22989.
FIGURE 2 Tiffany Mosaic Dome, Marshall Field & Co.’s Retail Store postcard (Chicago, Illinois). V. O. Hammon Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, VO1343.
Shopping and working in these cathedrals of consumption afforded white people at all social levels opportunities to enact an ostensibly common racial and class identity—consuming and displaying white middle-class accoutrements and behaviors—in order to diminish differences and create or affirm an elevated social position. At the same time and in contrast with many other public spaces in America, the department store’s wavering color line made that space racially ambiguous, contradictory, and thus vulnerable. In many ways it made blacks equal to whites as consumers, offering them occasions to browse through and dream of purchasing luxurious commodities, to be waited on by white sales workers, and even to secure employment considered a step above domestic and factory work. They met and engaged whites, not as their servants but as putatively equal shoppers. All of this, African Americans insisted by the start of World War II, was key to achieving and demonstrating social mobility and equality.
Fashioning a White Middle-Class Identity
Early department stores were constructed largely with white middle-class women and their needs and fantasies in mind. In these grand emporiums, women engaged a world of possibilities where their dreams and desires could be at once imagined and fulfilled and they could defy the constraints of their everyday reality. With the purchase of an elegant dress and complementary shoes, hat, and jewelry, a woman could temporarily escape her woes, such as a neglectful spouse, unappreciative children, or the humdrum activities of her daily life. In one afternoon, with store clerks anticipating and attending to her every wish, she could transcend her reality and shed any existing feelings of worthlessness, disappointment, and boredom. Happiness, comfort, prosperity, class mobility, social superiority, attractiveness, and sexual appeal could be hers, if only for a few moments. The working-class woman also could find some relief from her daily struggles in the department store. She could escape the drudgeries of wage slavery by wandering store aisles, looking, desiring, fantasizing, and finding solace in what could be hers someday.
To ensure that such an experience awaited these customers, store architects modeled the space “along two complementary lines: the home and the downtown club” and, in the process, created a new public sphere for white women. As a home, the store treated “the customer … not just as a potential spender, but also as a guest, catered to and coddled.” With this intent, some stores, in an attempt to sell furniture, constructed model rooms. In 1908, Wanamaker’s New York on Broadway and 9th Streets opened to the public a twenty-two-room private home called “The House Palatial.” Located inside the store, this house modeled the decorated styles and furniture “of a family of taste and wealth, the best of its type that can be seen on Fifth Avenue or Hyde Park, London, and costing, with its furnishing and art works, over $250,000.”6 Such displays encouraged women to not only see the department store as a second home but also impelled them to believe that they “could ‘buy a virtuous home,’ to see her moral universe as [a] purchasable commodity.”7
As a downtown club, the store provided an impressive range of accommodations and services “to ease the rigors of consumption for females much as men’s clubs eased the burdens of paid employment for men” and to prolong women’s time in the store.8 During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the services and amenities offered by department stores proliferated exponentially. A 1929 nationwide survey of ninety-one stores conducted by the Journal of Retailing “revealed that over half offered the following services: public telephones, parcel checkrooms, lost and found services, shopping assistance, free delivery, waiting rooms, gift suggestion departments, mail-order departments, telephone order departments, accommodation bureaus, barber shops, restaurants, post offices, hospitals, radio departments, bus service, and shoe-shining stands. Over a fifth provided nurseries for shoppers’ children, and a few offered Saturday afternoon children’s theaters. One or more stores offered forty-eight other services.”9 These were, then, truly emporiums of consumption.
For many middle- and upper-class women, the emphasis on amenities and luxury in the store suggested that these grand emporiums were more than new public spaces for women. These institutions and their employees were their servants—servants most could not have otherwise afforded—upon whom women shoppers could act as and exert the power of a mistress. Thus, stores fostered a sense of entitlement and superiority among many of these women, which was an ironic contradiction to the democratization of consumption the stores otherwise touted. These women asserted that they “ought to be treated as individuals with special interests and with desires for comfort and pleasure” and were likely “induced … to believe that they ought to be served, not to serve others.”10 Shoppers “sometimes became imperious, pressing minor or fabricated complaints, taking for granted and abusing privileges, which stores considered favors.”11 Others rudely treated the store’s staff as second- or third-class citizens and expected them to fulfill the most arbitrary of demands. For example, according to one trade journal, some women who were known for carrying their poodles while they shopped “put [a] store [through] the expense of delivering a single spool of thread.”12
Although department stores were tailored to appeal to white women of privileged strata, they also convinced working-class and immigrant women that occasional store purchases, particularly at sales prices, or shopping in bargain, lower-priced departments, could confer a bourgeois life.13 Many, however, preferred to shop in chain stores or ethnic neighborhood shops owned by kin or friends. Here, unlike in large downtown department stores, working-class customers were catered to and respected.14
Equally as important as the accommodations and services offered to customers were the sales staff who served them. Managers worked to match their selling staff to their desired clientele. They assumed, rightly or wrongly, that customers wished “to be served by Americans.”15 Here, “American” refers to race and class as well as country of origin. White, native-born, middle-class women were most desired as salesclerks, but few had been willing to stand behind a counter before the economic crisis of the late 1920s and 1930s.16 Managers were unable to secure women with this combination of personal attributes, however, so whiteness became the most important requirement, trumping class and country of origin. Managers hired white working-class women, native and foreign-born, and then tried to transform them into “genteel but deferential workers, advisors as well as servants of the customers.” They skillfully assessed their backgrounds and transformation to determine where workers would be assigned. Generally, older and native-born women were appointed to higher-priced departments that required the touch of women with manners, while younger and immigrant women—those believed to be appropriate for bargain shoppers—were assigned to cheaper-priced departments.17
Regional characteristics, specifically the presence of industry and demographic composition, also influenced the hiring process. From 1890 to 1939, in more industrialized areas, such as Rhode Island, New Jersey, Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland, native-born women overwhelmingly worked in stores, while foreign-born women labored in factories and mills. In early twentieth-century Baltimore, native-born American women work...

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