well a lot of the northern-based stores ie sears, Penneys ect that had southern branches had a trick where they’d have separate restrooms drinking fountains ect but the white ones were always out of order it took a while but the whites would give in and use the “colored” amenities and eventually they’d remove the signs…or outright remove the other version
Given that your primary argument against the article is from the last line of the story, which in itself is quoting a tweet rather than any research, I think your hypothetical about Barnes and Noble is the strawest of men.
My primary argument was what I cited above about how the postmaster would put the kibosh on blacks having nice things so Sears somehow bypassed him and gave the merchandise to the carrier. The last line, by making a point in citing a random tweet, shows the poor research in the article.
Now, before I get accused of anything, I agree wholeheartedly that blacks were treated like absolute shit in the Jim Crow south and that was absolutely wrong. However, I have never read anything that shows that their mail didn’t get delivered or that they were barred from entire stores. Restaurants and hotels, yes. Lunch counters within stores? Probably, although they usually had segregated sections. But entire stores?
And Sears went to hell after 1964? Did blacks just desert them and start shopping at the racist country stores with their higher prices and monopolistic practices?
There’s just too much bullshit in the story. I’m sure parts of it are correct, but there too many red flags and no cites.
They did their research just fine. Someone quoted in the article (or maybe the author) mentioned that PEOPLE ON TWITTER tweeted that perhaps Amazon now plays a similar role as Sears once did. Personally I find this idea a bit wanting but it’s not hard to imagine blacks in some areas preferring to order from Amazon rather than shop under the suspicious gaze and tight-lipped rictus of barely civil racists.
SUMMARY: This was an mention of some Tweets, not the opinion of the VOA.
This is very interesting Do you have a cite for this with more information?
Elvis had black musicians and backup singers and if there was a problem he’d say if you dont allow them, I wont play.
FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, AL was one of the few in the South during the Fifties that allowed black and white musicians to perform together.
double post
In the South they don’t mind how close you get, as long as you don’t get to uppity. In the North they don’t mind how uppity you get, as long as you don’t get to close.
In business, some people will always try to get a commercial advantage by breaking or avoiding the law.
Although I didn’t grow up in the Jim Crow era, I have seen how my grandparents treated black people their own age in the 1970s.
The Texas born and bred ones kept a sort of social distance, but were NEVER impolite or condescending or anything like that. There was an unspoken social order, and everyone knew where they fit into it. They weren’t hateful and they were always respectful toward black people. Other than this social order thing, where they did their thing here, and black people did their thing over there, and the two spheres didn’t really interact much, my grandparents weren’t even overly racist. But they’d grown up with black people, and recognized them as people.
It was a big contrast to my southern Illinois raised grandparents who moved to the same area post WWII. As I understand it, they were raised in an all-white area, and didn’t have any real interaction with black people. They were angrily racist, for lack of a better term- they were just angry that they had to deal with black people or that they even lived nearby. They didn’t interact with black people any more than they had to, and resented even that.
I never got it- in all other respects, those grandparents were wonderful people- very loving, kind and patient. More so in a lot of ways than the Texas grandparents. But they had this irrational angry racist streak that to me anyway, pointed up how insane that their attitude was.
[sigh] UltraVires, hon, I don’t mind helping you out with explanations when you’re confused about something, but I think you sometimes forget that it’s possible for you to look things up on your own.
If you find something puzzling in Cornell professor Louis Hyman’s research that inspired that linked VOA story, you can just google the history of the Sears catalog and find out additional background information like this:
The linked article explained clearly that black farmworkers were often locked into the exploitative credit systems imposed by the local country stores/postoffices that were their only practical options for consumer goods (similar to the familiar “company store” model for isolated mine or factory workers). These merchants/postmasters naturally wanted to extract as much of the sharecroppers’ money (at monopolistic prices) as they could, rather than having to deal with competition from mail-order firms. So they refused to sell postal goods or services to their credit customers, in order to prevent them from shopping by mail order.
So Sears’ catalogue marketing instituted a system to bypass the postmaster by letting the rural customer effectively “purchase” stamps and money orders directly from rural mail carriers (many of whom were black), and the mail carriers would handle the transactions with the postoffice. I hope that clarifies for you the issues you were confused about.
When I visited my then boyfriend in 1979, in Mobile, Alabama there was an All White Club. I don’t know much about it.
I was having trouble figuring it out too - why would those racist postmasters/store owners not sell their customers money orders , etc but would sell the money orders to the mail carriers ? But the RFD gave me a clue ,and eventually I found the connection- the beginning of RFD coincided with and maybe even prompted the elimination of the sort of post office where the store owner was also the postmaster. So the carriers apparently weren’t buying the money orders from the store owner/postmaster - but that wasn’t really clear from the articles.
While on their U.S. tour, the Beatles refused to play in a Southern venue - in Atlanta, maybe? or Mobile? - unless it integrated, according to a recent documentary I saw.
President Lyndon Johnson integrated the faculty lounge of a Texas university by walking in with a black female professor on his arm.
Lee Harvey Oswald was a murderer, a bully, a mooch and an egotist, but he also never obeyed his hometown of New Orleans’s segregation laws. He would always make it a point to sit in the back of the bus with the black passengers.
Frank Sinatra was a major figure in fighting racial bias. He refused to play in Southern venues if they didn’t allow Sammy Davis Jr. to stay in their hotel when he was working there, supposedly asking “He can play here, but he can’t stay here?”