Preston Taylor

In a recent article of the well-read “Washington Post,” Antonia Noori Farzan explains how the famous department store Sears circumvented Jim Crow laws during the early 1900’s by the use of mail-order catalogues.  Entitled “Sears’s ‘radical’ past: How mail-order catalogues subverted the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow,“ this shows an interesting connection a well known business has with society and the laws that governed it almost a hundred years ago.

(Image from Amazon)

This article caught my eye because I enjoy analyzations of the ways companies interact with the communities in which they do business.  Since the main function of any entrepreneurial venture is to make money for those who start it, I feel that often times, businesses get a reputation of being greedy, and not benefiting anyone but themselves, as seen in this article by Harvard Business School.  This predisposition towards a distrust of big businesses is something that can be justified in certain circumstances, but more often then not, companies help society more than they hurt.  I enjoyed this article because it was a prime example of a business having a positive impact on its customers and the people that it served.  With this in mind, the article seems to closely follow the relationships between Business, State, and Society that we have been analyzing in class.

The very title itself mentions a particular law, a people group, and a corporation and how they interacted with each other during this time period.  The article describes how, from the end of slavery in the south to the end of the Jim Crow laws in 1964 and even beyond, African Americans in the south were widely discriminated against when it came to purchasing supplies from their local stores.  Thanks to these laws, it was legal for the white store owners of the small general stores that African Americans were forced to shop at to use extremely prejudice techniques when dealing with their black customers.  Typically, shopkeepers would refuse to give honest and fair credit, only offer them inferior goods, and gouge prices so African Americans had a difficult affair any time they needed supplies.  This changed drastically when Sears’ mail order catalogs began to circulate.  Instead of facing the unjust general store environment, African Americans simply had to write in their orders on a piece of paper to receive them in the mail a couple weeks later.  Made possible by a particular government regulation, the Rural Free Delivery Act, the mail service was opened to rural areas throughout the south, areas highly populated by African Americans.  This is a great example of the government helping businesses in the late 19th century expand, as it would increasingly do until the Gilded Age.  The catalog business helped black culture to broaden and expanding the minor freedom it gave from Jim Crow laws.

Julius Rosenwald, who had become a part owner of the company after Alvah Roebuck sold his share of the business in 1895, became a well-known philanthropist to the black community. He donated $4.3 million — the equivalent of more than $75 million today — to open nearly 5,000 “Rosenwald schools” in the rural South between 1912 and 1932, when he died.

Antonia Farzan goes of to explain other ways that Sears company and its executives helped African Americans free themselves from the oppression of the Jim Crow Laws.  This article provides more information about Julius and his schools, as well as the ways they benefitted the black community.

In all, the capitalistic nature of the Sears corporation had, opposite to one’s initial assumption, a positive impact on the communities within which it served.  Sears bypassed Jim Crow to expand their business, helping thousands of African Americans in the process.  Rural blacks gained access to needed goods and, as the article says best, their dignity.