Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement
Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s
By Traci Parker
328 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 13 halftones
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-4867-5
Published: April 2019 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-4866-8
Published: April 2019 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-4868-2
Published: February 2019
John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture
Buy this Book
- Paperback $39.95
- Hardcover $99.00
- E-Book $21.99
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Awards & distinctions
A 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
About the Author
Traci Parker is assistant professor of Afro-American studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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Reviews
"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
“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
“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
"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