Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s by Traci Parker (review)

The African American consumer has not received sufficient scholarly attention from historians. This is especially surprising given that the topic sits at the intersection of three thriving subfields: the history of capitalism, the history of consumer culture, and African American Studies. Ever since Lizabeth Cohen highlighted the experience of Black consumers in her important book A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (1990), only a small number of studies were dedicated to this subject. Furthermore, except for Robert Weems Jr.'s Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (1998), the few existing studies focus either on a specific brand of consumer goods, such as hair products, or on how Black consumers used their buying power to fight discrimination in public accommodations and hiring practices, via boycotts and "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" campaigns. There is still much to learn about the economic life of Black Americans since the late nineteenth century and a lot more to uncover about the contemporaneous rise of consumer capitalism and new forms of white supremacy that developed following the end of Reconstruction.

In light of this gap, Traci Parker's insightful book is a welcome and important contribution. The emphasis here is still on the link between consumption and the long struggle for civil rights but, by integrating this story within the history of the department store, Parker provides a rich and comprehensive account of the interaction between race and commerce. American department stores received their fair share of scholarly attention in the work of William Leach, Susan Porter Benson, Vicki Howard, and others. Parker's book builds on previous scholarship and reveals the significance of this arena to the African American experience in the twentieth century, both as a backdrop to Black class formation and a basis for Black political activism. Implicitly, the book also suggests that the history of the department store and American consumer society more broadly were shaped by racial politics.

The main arc of the book follows what Parker refers to as the Department Store Movement, a series of separate yet related political struggles that took place in major cities from the 1930s through the 1970s. By closely following several of these campaigns, Parker wishes to "reorient the long civil rights movement paradigm" to emphasize the "consistent economic dimensions and their effect on the civil rights revolution" (14). The book uncovers a flurry of activity from northeastern centers like New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, through midwestern hubs like Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, to Charlotte and Atlanta in the South and Los Angeles in the West. Targeting local businesses, including establishments such as Hecht's, Gimbel's, and Sears Roebuck, each of these campaigns was an exercise in community organizing and political protest. They brought together a coalition of national organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, and the Congress for Racial Equality, as well as labor unions, local groups, ad hoc committees, and the Black press. Organizers and participants experimented with and often triumphed by using various tactics including persuasion and negotiation, protests, sit-ins, boycotts, and legal actions. Following these campaigns, the book demonstrates that racial segregation "was particularly vulnerable in department stores, especially at a historical juncture when ordinary Americans' realization of true democracy had become intricately tied to their identity as consumers" (5).

Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement also reveals a seldom explored worker-consumer alliance. Scholars such as Robert Korstad, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Robin D. G. Kelley located many of the antecedents to the civil rights movement in the rise of industrial unions, New Deal labor law, and workplace-oriented militancy. Surveying the multiple department store–oriented campaigns, Parker compellingly argues that, at least since the 1940s...