Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s

FAIN: FT-260120-18

Traci Lynnea Parker
University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Amherst, MA 01003-9242)

Research and writing of a monograph on the economic consequences of the integration of American department stores, from the 1950s to the 1980s.

I am seeking the assistance of a NEH Summer Stipend, so that I can complete my first book, Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights (under contract at the University of North Carolina Press). During the summer of 2018, I will conduct archival research at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. Here, I will review the records of the Sears, Roebuck, and Company affirmative action cases, the subject of my book’s sixth and final chapter. These cases expose the retail industry’s discriminatory practices against African Americans and women, the industry's ongoing transformations, ones that revolutionized, or rather diminished the status of retail work and consumption, and the challenges and limitations of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s.

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Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (Book)
Title: Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s
Author: Parker, Traci
Editor: Grench, Charles
Abstract: 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.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469648675/department-stores-and-the-black-freedom-movement/
Primary URL Description: UNC Press's book website
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 1469648679
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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