[Image from amazon.com]

Most people would never guess that the slightly odd smelling, usually abandoned Sears at your local mall was on the leading edge of the civil rights movement in the early 1900’s. Antonia Noori Farzan seeks to enlighten the public on Sear’s racially progressive ideas in her article “Sears’s ‘radical’ past: How mail-order catalogues subverted the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow”

The Big Idea that is tackled by Farzan is business, state, and society. She begins the article by stating her overarching belief in what Sears was able to do for the black community.

[Sears] revolutionized rural black southerner’ shopping patterns in the late 19th century,                         subverting racial hierarchies by allowing them to make purchases by mail or over the                             phone and avoid the blatant racism that they faced at small country stores.

Let be begin by breaking down this quote in terms of our Big Ideas. Sears business model was relatively simple, they were a large department store and in order to extend their business to rural areas, where it wasn’t feasible to build a brick and mortar store, they began sending out mail-order catalogues so that customers could call in their orders and have them shipped to their homes. Incidentally, this led to blacks using the catalogues as a way to avoid the discrimination that they were facing in their local country stores. Regarding the effects of government, the Sears catalogues were being shipped during the peak of Jim Crow laws. In Sears actual stores they had to comply with Jim Crow laws, so blacks could only have jobs in the warehouse or as janitors. Lastly, in terms of social situations, blacks were outwardly discriminated against. Farzan writes about how in their local stores black were always served last and given the lowest-grade items. Because there was no discrimination when the business couldn’t see the color of your skin, blacks took to the Sears catalogue where they could get high quality items without fear of prejudice.

The Sears company influenced black culture in other says. Culturally, their cheap steel-guitars allowed for a whole new genre of music- Delta blues. Without the catalogue, blacks wouldn’t have been able to afford these steel string guitars, but at Sears, they were only $1.26 ($50 in today’s dollars), giving low income individuals access to music. Furthermore, Rosenwald, a part-owner of Sears, donated over $75 million (in today’s dollars) to education. His money created over 5,000 schools in the rural south, leading to the advancement of education for black children. In the 1930’s 1 out of every 3 black students went to a Rosenwald school until they were shut down after Brown v. Board of Education.

Sears policy of commercial inclusion for minorities wasn’t without backlash. Local merchants were known for paying people to steal/ collect Sears catalogues and having bonfires with the collected books. The reasoning behind this is two-fold. First, Sears was taking business away from them because the customers that were usually buying items from the store were instead ordering from Sears. Second, they didn’t want blacks to be able to have access to the same quality products that they did.

Overall, we see that Sears had a large part in introducing minorities, and specifically blacks, into the marketplace following the Civil War. Although the company was not without its flaws, it paved the way for the Civil Rights movement and the equality between all groups that we now enjoy in America.