Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement

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

Bibliographic Data

ID20003026
AuthorsTraci Parker (corresponding author)
Year2019
Pages328
Publication date2019-04-08
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueDepartment Stores and the Black Freedom Movement (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherUniversity of North Carolina Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5149/northcarolina/9781469648675.001.0001
OpenAlexW4238836668
Open LibraryOL28705607M
ISBN9781469648675
LanguageEN
Citations received12

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

Advertising · African american · Art · Black Power · Business · Civil rights · Middle class · Movement (music) · Political science · Power (physics) · Sociology · White (mutation) · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society · African American consumers · African American white collar workers · African americans · Department stores · History · Middle class African Americans · Political activity · White collar crimes