Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement

“Parker succeeds in bringing the department store as a significant political and cultural space into larger ways of understanding black subjectivity and citizenship. . . . Thanks to Parker, department stores will never again be passing references—mere scenery—for the larger historical drama of the modern Black Freedom Movement. . . . They have become places in which to see the main show.”—Journal of African American History

“The historiographical debate surrounding the periodization and economic dimensions of the Black Freedom Movement is both well worn and unsettled. . . . Tracy Parker skillfully and importantly expands the scope of this debate.”—North Carolina Historical Review

“Sheds light on the intricacies and impacts of African Americans' attempts to be afforded the right to work and shop at established stores. Wonderfully detailed.”—Library Journal

“Parker draws on government, social movement, and private sector documents along with periodicals and oral histories to show African Americans in a dozen northern and southern cities subverting 'this ambiguous and contradictory space' of retail.”—CHOICE

“In this fascinating book, Traci Parker convinces us that the department store of the twentieth century was far from a frivolous place. Rather it was a site as central to African American workers’ and consumers’ struggle for equality as the better-known factory floor and voting booth.” —Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University

“This is a powerful and largely untold story. Parker masterfully captures the distinct yet intertwined fates of worker and consumer rights.” —Victoria W. Wolcott, State University of New York at Buffalo

“Traci Parker’s meticulously researched book offers us a brilliant analysis of department stores as sites of black resistance to discrimination in both work and leisure. This is a welcome addition to the field of African American history, and, more broadly, the history of capitalism.” —Vicki Howard, author of From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store

“Traci Parker’s Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement is a highly readable account of African American struggles to secure equal access to the palaces of consumption that once dominated American retail. While pre–civil rights era department stores were theoretically open to all, most offered blacks few employment opportunities, and unequal service. Parker’s book chronicles both this discrimination and black resistance to it, offering an engrossing account of the department store movement that extends from the 'Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work Campaigns' of the 1920s to the sit-ins of the 1960s.” —Mia Bay, coeditor of Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line