The Department Store Movement in the Postwar Era

Abstract

Chapter 4 considers the department store movement and the birth of a modern middle-class consciousness in the 1940s and 1950s. Department stores remained key battlegrounds and took on greater significance as black purchasing power had reached an unprecedented level of $8-9 million by 1947 and the relationship between consumption and citizenship had changed. For the most part, the department store movement remained a fight for jobs in the immediate postwar era, taking on consumer issues as it saw fit. This phase of the movement marked a period of preliminary testing that would eventually lead to militant protests in the 1950s and 1960s. Under the leadership of the National Urban League (NUL) and American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the movement relied on intercultural education and moral exhortations. Emblematic of racial liberalism and the early civil rights movement, the NUL and AFSC believed that if respectable blacks and white community leaders simply asked store officials to hire African Americans in sales and clerical, they would, and after that “their attitude about integrated workplaces and African Americans generally would change,” helping them “topple barriers in other industries and locations.”