In a 1942 conference on “the Negro in Business” organized by the Department of Commerce, Roscoe W. Dunjee, editor of the Oklahoma newspaper the Black Dispatch and the recently appointed President of the National Negro Business League, commented on the status of the Black consumer. He claimed that for the African American businessman, “the trouble has hitherto been with his destitute customer, the Negro worker, who had nothing to spend when he arrived at the store.” Luckily, by the 1940s, the times had changed. Dunjee repeated a much-touted recent statistic, determining that “the Negro’s annual spending power in the United States is seven billion dollars. That is the amount 13,000,000 Black people spend each year for food, clothing, and shelter.”Footnote 1 Indeed, through the 1930s, the Black consumer became a significant economic and political agent. The Great Migration and the New Deal, which resulted in expanded employment opportunities, transformed the Black population from a southern, rural, and relatively impoverished demographic to one more concentrated in cities across the country. African Americans were now better educated, with higher incomes and more money to spend. Consequently, Black consumers were increasingly courted by advertisers and vendors, while, at the same time, they developed methods to utilize their buying power to fight for more opportunities and rights.
Like Dunjee and his contemporaries, historians have paid much attention to the expansion of African American consumer power in the decades leading up to the Civil Rights Movement. Since Lizabeth Cohen described how Black Chicagoans encountered mass culture and mass consumption during the New Deal era, many scholars have documented how Black Americans shaped and interacted with various elements of consumer culture.Footnote 2 As Susannah Walker has remarked, most of this literature focuses on how racism and racial discrimination shaped the development of consumer society in the United States and how these two factors affected African American participation in consumer society.Footnote 3 As such, the existing scholarship tends to emphasize the transitory period between the 1930s and the 1960s – an era of intensifying mass protest that culminated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Current scholarship details the discriminatory practices Black Americans encountered as shoppers, while accentuating their escalating struggle to become equal participants in a consumer arena that was both orchestrated for and dominated by white people. Yet, given that, until the 1930s, economic discrimination placed most Black consumers in the “destitute customer” category, only a handful of studies examine African American consumer desires and ideologies that predate the midcentury rise of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns and Black consumer boycotts.Footnote 4 In other words, there remains little scholarship on the emergence of the African American as a consumer.Footnote 5
This article traces the early origins of Black consumer culture as it was portrayed in the Black Press from the late 1800s to the early 1920s, the era during which American capitalism became dependent on commercial consumption and the pursuit of goods turned into an engine of economic growth. In their pioneering history of mass consumption, T. J. Jackson Lears and Richard Wightman Fox note that, in order to “discover how consumption became a cultural ideal, a hegemonic ‘way of seeing’ in twentieth-century America,” it is essential to look at “the powerful individuals and institutions who conceived, formulated, and preached that ideal or way of seeing.” For African Americans, much of this endeavor was taken up by the Black press. From the 1890s to the First World War, several hundred Black newspapers were published in the United States. Most of these publications were short-lived concerns due to the fact that they had to rely on a very small subscriber base consisting of the urban, literate, and financially stable minority of Black Americans. Written and read by the Black aspiring classes, the consumerist discourse presented in such papers provides an excellent and previously unexamined window to the ways the African American elite imagined, conceived, and delineated a Black culture of consumption.Footnote 6
Specifically, I argue that, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Black papers helped establish what other historians have referred to as the “Black commercial public sphere.” Scholars such as Quincy T. Mills and Davarian L. Baldwin show how the waves of Black migrants arriving at urban centers in the Northeast and Midwest “transformed the marketplace,” whether in barbershops, beauty salons, movie theaters, or sports stadiums, into “a public sphere of dialog.”Footnote 7 Their studies also emphasize how members of the Black elite, particularly businesspeople, cultural producers, and intellectuals, “engaged the arena of commercial exchange” that formed in the new Black urban enclaves “to rethink the established parameters of community, progress, and freedom.” However, before the Great Migration began in earnest, this flourishing Black metropolis was still in the making, as more than 70 percent of African Americans lived in the rural South. Nevertheless, as this article will show, even though, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the vast majority of Black shoppers could not enjoy the full benefits offered by the emerging consumer society, African American newspapers already engaged an imagined Black arena of commercial exchange.Footnote 8 A survey of African American newspapers from the Progressive Era shows that consumption was significant to the Black elite’s schemes for racial uplift and the effort to develop a positive Black identity. Therefore, by consistently encouraging their readers to participate in commercial activity, Black newspapers at the turn of the century were already setting the stage for what would become, by the 1920s, a vibrant African American marketplace filled with public discourse.
The commercial sphere envisaged by the Black press was gendered. It assigned different consumer roles for men and women, suggesting that everyone had to buy goods, but each gender needed to do so in a specific way. According to Black editors, participation in consumer society would assist the advancement of the race, providing that Black men and women abide by their respective appropriate behaviors. The discussion revolving around the purchase of consumer goods distinguished between two modes of consumption: one reserved for women and the other neutral, if not manly. The distinction was verbal. Women were shoppers; they shopped. Men and everyone else who considered themselves proud members of the race were patrons; they patronized Black-owned stores. In her important study of sexuality in the Black press, Kim Gallon argued that “the expression of sexual values within [these papers] helped to modify dominant notions of what it meant to be ‘race’ men and women.”Footnote 9 Drawing on her claims, this article demonstrates that the conversation about consumption in African American newspapers was part of the same endeavor. Within this context, the act of shopping was conceived as a feminine social pastime. Shopping advice, propagations about shopping etiquette, and jokes about stereotypical shoppers were, for the most part, directed at women. The written mentions of shopping marked it as a desired and respectable activity for women and, in that sense, attached this activity to the mission of racial uplift that had dominated African American thought since the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 10 Black women were encouraged to mimic the behavior of white women of leisure: to frequent stores, to browse without necessarily making a purchase, but to be frugal and savvy about the goods they did buy. The implicit message was that by shopping properly, Black women would become part of the “leisure class” and help the race transcend the status of a poor, subordinate class.Footnote 11
Patronage, on the other hand, signified a different endeavor, one that invoked racial solidarity and more formal political activism. From the late 1880s to the early 1920s, Black editors were indisposed to acknowledge the discrimination and maltreatment experienced by Black buyers and rarely discussed consumption in relation to interracial politics. However, consumption did play a role in intracommunity politics. In line with the ideology of self-help, opinion columns in Black papers often encouraged their readers to support Black-owned businesses not as shoppers but as patrons. Patronage was discussed as a gender-neutral activity but it carried masculine undertones. Within the broader conversation about racial uplift, self-help was particularly associated with the male-dominated business sphere and the assumption that, with the acquisition of wealth, African Americans would secure civil rights. Thus, patronizing was an economically empowering activity, led by men, who lent their financial support to other members of the race. Unlike shopping, patronage did not designate a code of conduct. It referred to one action only – spending money in Black-owned establishments. Patronizing and shopping were certainly related, but each verb carried a different emphasis. Both promoted racial uplift in a different way; “patronizing” stressed the political economy while “shopping” highlighted what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham refers to as “the politics of respectability.”Footnote 12 However, by classifying commercial activity according to these two categories, the Black press carved out clear gender roles within the emerging Black consumer society.
In a broader context, the Black press echoed the language of mainstream white papers, advertisers, and industrialists at the turn of the century by celebrating consumption as a desirable civic mission. Charles McGovern claimed that from the late nineteenth century to the Great Depression, the mainstream press “created an enduring vision of citizenship based on purchasing, ownership, and display” of goods while imparting “an aura of democracy to the distribution of goods.” Though the African American press did not draw any direct association between consumption and democracy, it did suggest that the ability to shop was “an important element of American public life.”Footnote 13 The purchasing of goods was presented as an upright activity, one that adorned its performer with affluence, respect, and, to some degree, power. Moreover, a deliberate separation between the shopping experience and the socioeconomic trials faced by the Black race, combined with the assertion that Black patronage held the key to racial advancement, insinuated that these activities reflected an unblemished, shared American experience. It implied that the consumer arena, if not wholly democratic, was an arena of similarity rather than difference. By presenting consumption and particularly shopping the same way it was presented in the white press, African American editors created an expectation of sameness.
Finally, by outlining its role in shaping early African American conceptions of consumerism, this article also expands the study of the Black press. Much like the literature on African American consumer culture, the existing scholarship tends to focus almost exclusively on the ways African American newspapers helped spearhead the struggle for civil rights.Footnote 14 Recently, scholars such as Adam Green have argued that beyond their political activism, Black media structures served as “agents of modernity” and “proved as important as civil institutions in codifying norms of collective identity.”Footnote 15 The efforts of the Black press to define its readers’ relationship with an evolving consumer arena suggests that Black media was codifying behavior and not just identity, that it was engaged in such codification at least since the late nineteenth century, and that it prioritized the codification of the commercial sphere. As a wide-ranging, keywords-guided search in over twenty newspapers confirms, such codification was an African American journalistic practice all across the United States. It can be detected in long running weeklies, such as the Washington Bee and in short-lived ones like Washington, D.C.’s Colored American. Preoccupation with the African American culture of consumption is apparent in more broadly circulated publications like the Chicago Defender; in ones that serviced smaller communities, including the Iowa Bystander; in Republican-leaning papers; independent newspapers; as well as in the occasional Democratic paper, such as the Tulsa Star. Footnote 16 North, south, east, and west, African American newspapers suggested to their readers that consumption would manifest their suitability for modernity.Footnote 17
Newspapers
Before the 1920s, publishing a newspaper catered to African American readers was not a financially lucrative business. Low literacy rates and poor economic conditions resulted in a compact subscriber base. Additionally, the poverty of many Black Americans placed most of them outside the “Able-to-Buy class,” as it was defined by the advertising industry.Footnote 18 Consequently, Black newspapers could not benefit from the commercial capital injected into the white publishing industry by the advertising business. For the white mainstream press, advertisement revenue increased from 44 percent of total newspaper income in 1880 to 60 percent in 1909.Footnote 19 Black-owned papers, by comparison, featured few ads from local Black businesses. This fact adversely affected their size and longevity. The typical African American-owned paper was a four- to eight-page weekly and most papers did not survive more than a couple of years. Black publishers were often called “sundown editors,” working at nights while holding other daytime jobs. Still, a relatively large number of people chose this career path. According to one estimate, there were ten African American papers in existence in 1870, thirty in 1880, and 154 in 1890. A different approximation suggests 1,200 Black newspapers were founded between 1866 and 1905. And a third survey found that, by 1910, the number of Black papers increased to 288, with a combined circulation of 500,000.Footnote 20
The limited number of pages in these newspapers was largely dedicated to racial advancement. Black papers were not admitted to the Associated Press and therefore could not enjoy the discounted telegraph rates and the shared content available to members of this professional organization. Hence, news was often local, concerning churches, fraternal organizations, and members of the community. The editorial tone was moderate; it combined elements of self-help ideology with a philosophy of individual success inspired by industrial capitalism. Stories reinforced racial pride by offering triumphant profiles of African Americans who succeeded in business, arts, sports, and politics. However, in his study of Black newspapers, William G. Jordan explains that the success model embraced by African American editors “contained a germ of collectivism,” stressing that individuals should also aspire to elevate the Black community with their actions. As the Savannah Tribune professed on January 1, 1876, every African American ought to “love his race and do his part to advance its interests.”Footnote 21
Politically, at least until World War I, most papers shied away from militancy. Echoing Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist approach to civil rights, Black editors rarely encouraged political protest. In the South, personal conservative tendencies were exacerbated by the threat of violence as white supremacists aimed to harm the few Black newsmen and newswomen who raised their voices against racial discrimination. The list of threatened individuals included the editors of the Montgomery Baptist Leader, the Selma Independent, the Wilmington Daily Reader, and, most famously, Ida B. Wells, who wrote for the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. Beyond the South, Black papers did report on segregation, disenfranchisement, anti-miscegenation laws, and lynching, albeit cautiously and with restraint. Some editors, including T. Thomas Fortune of the New York Age and Julius F. Taylor of the Broad Ax, adopted a militant and uncompromising line, consistently calling for assimilation and equality. However, the vast majority of Black papers looked inward, focusing instead on intracommunity affairs and racial uplift. Black publishers utilized their limited means to print materials that, as the Indianapolis World put it in 1888, could serve “to build up our people – to refine their manners and improve their morals – to inspire race pride – to develop race enterprise, [and] to include a higher conception of duty and citizenship.” Buying consumer goods proved useful to all of these endeavors.Footnote 22
Shoppers
Shopping was presented as a respectable pastime, practiced by honorable members of the community. The Black press regularly reported on the doings of local dignitaries who were visiting relatives, conducting business, attending local club meetings, fulfilling church functions, falling ill, recovering, and shopping. “Rev. and Mrs. S. E. Williams of Mt. Carbon, were shopping here Wednesday,” reported the West Virginia Advocate on December 17, 1908.Footnote 23 “While here on a shopping tour from LaPorte, Ind[iana], Mrs. Maude Ralston Banks spent a portion of her time as a guest of Mrs. Clara Belle Barley,” divulged the Chicago-based Broad Ax on May 5, 1906.Footnote 24 The inclusion of shoppers in these society pages labeled their action as a worthy leisure activity, a decent amusement in which distinguished members of the community took part. Such reports were also characteristic of local white-owned papers.Footnote 25 Among the Black press they were featured in papers that served smaller African American communities, like the Denver Star, as well as larger and broadly distributed papers, such as the Chicago Defender. In all of them, shopping, a relatively new pastime of the Black elite, was presented side by side with more traditional respectable acts, and thus legitimized as an equally wholesome pursuit. “Mrs. M. Henderson of Morgan Park, Ill[inois], who was in the city shopping during the week, remained over and attended the regular meeting of Ruth temple, of which she is a member,” the Defender made known in 1920, binding the sacred and the commercial.Footnote 26
The vast majority of those spotted shopping were women. This phenomenon was not unique to African Americans. With the rise of consumer society and the growing reliance on industrial commodities, women’s responsibilities as homemakers expanded to include spending on all forms of household goods. Indeed, women constituted the lion’s share of the consuming public. New consumer institutions, led by department stores, identified women as their primary clientele and devised various tactics to encourage their patronage. Consequently, monied women frequented new urban districts dedicated to consumption and related amusements.Footnote 27 Though the growing presence of women in the public sphere often provoked opposition, the Black press seems to have embraced this new phenomenon approvingly. Shopping was consistently framed as a respectable feminine behavior and not only in the society pages. For example, in 1904, the Baltimore Afro-American chose a reprinted bit from the Pictorial Review about the shopping habits of a Russian countess to open its Women’s World section. “The daughter of the Russian Ambassador, the Countess Cassini, is an indefatigable shopper and is well known in all the stores in Washington,” the segment reported, adding that “she delights in matching silks, selecting trimmings and looking for bargains.” Tellingly, a following section in the same column, picked up from the Ladies Pictorial, celebrated the charitable work of Florence Nightingale, suggesting at least a hint of equivalence between the shopper and the nurse – both engaged in noteworthy activities.Footnote 28
The comparison between shopping and charity or churchwork is especially intriguing when one considers the non-practical nature affixed to the first by the press. Society pages never detailed the items purchased by local members of the community and seldom mentioned the specific stores they visited. The verb itself packed all the purpose; it needed no direct object. In fact, the implied interpretation of this concept excluded the utilitarian purchasing of goods. Take for example the joke printed by the Tulsa Star in 1915: “I am going down town this morning,” said Mrs. Ex. “Shopping, my dear?” asked her husband. “No,” she replied, “I haven’t time for that; just to buy some things that I need.”Footnote 29 Shopping was a privilege reserved for the ladies of luxury; enjoyable only if inefficient. In a segment titled “The Art of Shopping” that appeared in the Broad Ax, one woman sets out “to buy [her]self a box of face powder.” She asks her friend if she could help select it. “Certainly,” assents the friend; “suppose we begin by looking at refrigerators and lace curtains.”Footnote 30 Efficiency was a hindrance. “You can’t tell till you look around,” explains Ellen to her friend Isabel, who dared suggest it is best to plan your purchases beforehand and arrive at the store with a clear idea of what you desire. “That’s absurd,” claims Ellen, “I know you save your time your way … But if I sat down and thought it all out at once … I shouldn’t feel as if I was buying clothes at all.”Footnote 31
Such bits were meant to poke fun at female shoppers. At first glance, the criticism directed at their “conspicuous consumption” appears to mimic the satire of Thorstein Veblen and the worries of other critics, who looked down upon the social and behavioral effects of the new consumer culture. However, one could argue that this particular form of humor served to encourage rather than discourage consumption. The butt of the joke is always a respectable and enviable woman; she is married, monied, and often quite clever. “What a comfort the exchange system is,” exclaimed a woman shopper in a joke printed by the Broad Ax in 1905. “Yesterday I bought a hat which I didn’t like … so, to-day I brought it back and got three pounds of butter and a mousetrap for it.”Footnote 32 Even more, these jokes laughed at a conduct that was, in actuality, beneficial to the socioeconomic vision of vendors, admen, and industrialists. In her historical account of American department stores, Vicki Howard explains that modern selling, as it was developed in the last decades of the nineteenth century, relied on the idea of “free access,” according to which the store became a new kind of place where middle-class women could shop, but also relax, browse, and socialize.Footnote 33 Additionally, for African Americans, association with the new leisure class, despite its implied frivolousness and extravagance, signified a break from the white portrayal of Black people as a poor underclass.
Therefore, while teasing women for participating in the new culture of consumption, jokes printed by the press never really ridiculed them for it. On the contrary, by printing so many jokes about female shoppers, newspapers normalized and enforced the idea that consuming was an essential part of a woman’s role. Furthermore, if going shopping was a woman’s task, then avoiding it was a male tendency and it was equally funny. “You look exhausted,” says a man to his friend in a joke printed by the New York Age. “Been shopping with your wife?” he asks. “No,” replies the friend, “I’ve been trying to get out of going.”Footnote 34 In 1907, the Minnesota-based Appeal simply stated, “if there is one thing a man would rather not do than another is to accompany his wife on a shopping tour.”Footnote 35 This wisdom was offered out of context, as a stand-alone maxim. Shopping was an acceptable feminine behavior. A man was supposed to complain while enabling it.
Humoristic bits about shopping appeared in all newspapers of the era. In fact, most of the jokes published by Black papers were copied from white-owned papers. Copying and reprinting was a common and standard practice in American journalism throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.Footnote 36 Short bits and jokes rarely included a source, and so readers of Black papers could have encountered some of the same content in other publications. For example, a joke titled “Sympathy,” printed by the Broad Ax on February 5, 1916, poked fun at a disappointed wife whose husband’s burst of rheumatism meant she could not go shopping. The same joke appeared in over fifteen other papers that same month.Footnote 37 Even if the content was not original, to reprint was a choice as was the decision to mimic journalistic trends, like the inclusion of shoppers in society pages. With relation to shopping, Black editors intentionally duplicated the language of the white press. They welcomed elements of the dominant consumer ideology, hence signaling to their upper-class readers that they should do the same.
Another element replicated by African American editors was a journalistic commitment to the dissemination of a bourgeois consumerist etiquette. The novelty of shopping as a social phenomenon inspired many newsmen to serve as arbiters of good consumer manners. Newspapers were filled with advice to shoppers about what, where, and, most importantly, how to shop. The fact that this consumerist activity was mostly associated with women only heightened the need to regulate behavior. As several scholars have shown, members of the Black aspiring classes, like many of their white contemporaries, saw it as their responsibility and racial duty to educate and, thus, protect the young Black girls and women who migrated to urban centers in growing numbers.Footnote 38 “There is no work more nerve trying than shopping, and a good, substantial luncheon will help much,” explained the Montana Plaindealer in 1908. “Take an hour to rest and eat,” suggested the paper, “thinking as little as possible of the tasks yet to be accomplished, and there will not be such a splitting headache to take home on the train in the evening.”Footnote 39 “Cheap things are not just as good except to the seller, who always makes more money on such articles than on good, straight, honest goods,” declared the Broad Ax as early as 1897.Footnote 40 The Ax, which relocated from Salt Lake City to Chicago in 1899, was particularly attuned to the hazards of modern shopping and frequently reprinted advice columns aimed to help its readers make wise choices. “When bargain hunting it is a good plan to find out just what grade of goods you are paying for,” recommended a segment from 1904, explaining that bargains are “made out of the second choice of material.”Footnote 41 By 1919, general warnings turned into detailed guidelines on “how to detect impure material,” including tips such as “hold the fabric up to the light” in order to discern between cotton and linen, or, “burn a bit” to detect pure silk.Footnote 42 Often, the Ax would print lists of “Don’ts for Buyers,” ensuring best practice in shopping for various articles.Footnote 43
Conforming to the dominant consumerist norms was so important that some Black papers penned original articles on this topic. In 1894, in a segment titled “Side Talk to All,” the Washington Bee made sure to discuss the consumer arena among a long list of propagations concerning manners and morals. “It is certainly improper for a younger man and woman to go shopping together before they are married even though they may be engaged,” warned the paper. This notice immediately followed an affirmation that “the best way for a man to show his sincere love for a woman is to ask her to become his wife,” in addition to more general aphorisms, such as, “be what you are and nothing more.”Footnote 44
Nearly twenty years later, the Pittsburgh Courier published a lengthy and detailed treatise on proper consumer behavior. “There is an enormous number of women with so little to do in life that they can spend hours in the stores and never make a single purchase,” observed the paper. Such behavior was unwelcome: “shopping as a diversion or as a means of killing time is a form of bad manners.” The reason, explained the Courier, was that “people employed to sell goods are judged by the amount they sell”; therefore, “if you take a needless amount of their time … when you do not intend to buy, you are keeping them from making money.” However, the Courier made sure to distinguish between discourtesy and savviness. “On the other hand,” the article made clear, “you need never feel embarrassment on leaving a store without making a purchase if you have actually gone in to buy and have not found just what you want,” since “sometimes it happens that you honestly want to compare prices and do not wish to buy at the first place you go. This is a reasonable enough attitude to take.” While most of this promulgation was aimed at women, the Courier did not miss the opportunity to contemplate about masculine consumer behavior, commenting that “men who spend so much time shopping are of course in the minority,” because “there are a few men with leisure,” and “very few who would find this shop visiting a diversion.”Footnote 45 (Figure 1)
Figure 1. Interior of “Negro” store, Buffalo, New York, circa 1899. African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Finally, a respectable shopping excursion also supposed a suitable destination. Black papers often featured articles celebrating the opening of a new business establishment. Such stories were advertisements masked as news items and, it is reasonable to assume, they were paid for by the featured business.Footnote 46 Nevertheless, the list of superlatives deployed to aggrandize the new store in town also served to signify the ideal shopping experience. These promotional pieces implicitly informed Black shoppers about what they could hope to encounter and how they should expect to be treated in any business they chose to enter. For example, in April 1907, the Colorado Statesman published a two-page article about the facilities of the Denver Dry Goods Company. The reopening of the city’s celebrated department store was announced in many Colorado newspapers earlier that year, but this particularly long piece appears to be unique to the Statesman. Footnote 47 Perhaps the white owners of the “largest department store and mail order business west of Chicago” wished to attract African American clientele and decided to appeal to them directly.
Whoever penned this advertisement certainly raised the expectations of any prospective Black shopper. It promised a sales force that is “selected with great care,” comprising of “ladies and gentlemen … familiar with all those polite little amenities of social intercourse.” Within the store’s many halls, “almost every desirable thing in the way of merchandise … can be found displayed,” and “every need is promptly met,” while “the customer … finds all the conditions incident to his purchase scrupulously complied with.” For ladies, the Dry Goods Company reserved a balcony as well as “a large general reception and rest room [including] upholstered chairs and couches, writing desks, stationery, [and] toilet rooms.” Additionally, the store promised the African American readers of the Statesman “a new tea room, up to the hour in every detail of equipment and service,” and “a modern soda water fountain,” accompanied by “courteous and attentive attaches.”Footnote 48
It is not entirely clear whether Black customers of the Denver Dry Goods Company were indeed able to enjoy all the “little amenities” promised by this story. The Statesman often encouraged African Americans to migrate to Colorado in order to escape the “untold barbarities” and “unspeakable treatment” of the Jim Crow South. However, racial discrimination was not absent from the Centennial State. In Denver, for example, residential segregation confined the Black population to a few designated areas, such as the Five Points District.Footnote 49 Moreover, as historian Traci Parker explains, even though department stores across the United States welcomed African American customers, they also “restricted their movement and participation” and “rarely extended [them] the same customer service they did to whites.” Black shoppers were often refused service at the store’s dining facilities, not permitted to try on clothes, denied store credit, and rarely addressed with the courtesy and respect reserved for white patrons.Footnote 50 If Black shoppers at the Denver Dry Goods Company encountered such maltreatment, the Statesman did not prepare them for it. On the contrary, the paper fostered a fantasy of the shopping experience by helping its readers envision a “paradise for shoppers” for themselves.Footnote 51
Generally, despite the fact that African American shoppers often faced discriminatory practices in commercial spaces, segregation and discrimination with regard to shopping were seldom discussed by the Black press.Footnote 52 Historian Grace Elizabeth Hale has demonstrated how, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, southern spaces of consumption “became key sites for the white southern middle class’s creation of … the culture of segregation.”Footnote 53 At the same time, in urban centers outside the South, such as New York and Chicago, stores mounted various racial boundaries that denied Black Americans equal access. In her book, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement, Parker documents countless testimonies of prejudice and discrimination experienced by Black customers, recounted in oral histories, interviews, and memoirs. However, this lived experience was rarely echoed by the Black press in real time.Footnote 54 It is not entirely clear why the Statesman and other African American papers downplayed the discrimination of Black consumers in white-owned stores. One possible explanation is that publishers wished to encourage local businesses to advertise in their papers and, therefore, circumvented any bad publicity to these stores. Such an attitude fits within the moderate political tone embraced by most Black publishers at the time.
Furthermore, a rosy consumerist fantasy completed the vision of shopping as something worth doing. By depicting shopping as a respectable pastime performed in benign, if not luxurious, surroundings, Black editors encouraged their readers, particularly the female ones, to shop. As scholars such as Lears have shown, “fables of abundance” were an integral component of consumer society.Footnote 55 In the case of Black consumers, tales of courteous customer service were perhaps necessary to overcome anxieties and venture into a reality that was suffused with discrimination.
Patrons
The consumer arena was not wholly devoid of racial and political connotations. Most Black editors subscribed to the ideology of self-help. Though it originated before the Civil War, in its late nineteenth-century iteration, self-help philosophy was based on the assumption that “by the acquisition of wealth and morality – attained largely by their own efforts – [Black Americans] would gain the respect of white men and thus be accorded their rights as citizens.” The attainment of wealth depended to a great extent on the establishment of Black-owned businesses and on the racial solidarity of Black consumers, who would support those businesses and help them thrive. African American leaders such as Booker T. Washington, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, and even W. E. B. Du Bois echoed the cry of “negro money for negro merchants.”Footnote 56 Papers catering to African American readers, which were themselves Black-owned businesses, also promoted this line. However, calls for racial solidarity in the consumer arena remained detached from the discourse on shopping. This disconnect was manifested lexically. Items about shopping that utilized the verb “to shop” seldom, if ever, mentioned any commitment to Black enterprise. At the same time, many editorials urged their readers to support Black-owned stores not as shoppers but as patrons – i.e., to patronize Black businesses.
“It is high time that our people were learning to patronize their own color instead of those of the other race,” declared the Richmond Planet in 1897. “Take a view at our people’s stores, see their beautiful and gorgeous stock of goods, then ask yourself the question do I patronize them?” This question was followed by another: “Would you with your common sense and sound reasoning fail to push them onward by giving them your liberal support?” The paper also determined that once Black customers “cease to slander and learn to encourage” Black merchants, then “success is [theirs].”Footnote 57 To patronize, according to the Planet, was to encourage and to facilitate success. It was also rational. Therefore, by implication, not to patronize Black stores was irrational. Or, in other words, as the Broad Ax stated three years later, “the negro who thinks he is ‘actin’ like de white fo’ks’ and who refuses to patronize Negro establishments, is a fool.”Footnote 58 The Tulsa Star confirmed the link between patronage and rationality, claiming, in 1916 that “it seems strange to us why our people do not patronize their own businesses like other people. This is nothing but practical common sense … Every other race has learned it, and to argue that we have not learned it is equivalent to admitting a lack of race pride and appreciation.”Footnote 59 Unlike shopping, which was portrayed as an inefficient, albeit respectable pastime, patronizing was practical and it had many utilitarian benefits. Indeed, the verb “to shop” did not appear in any of these articles.
Of course, patronize and shop are not synonyms. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the commercial meaning of shopping, as “the action of visiting a shop or shops to buy or view goods,” dates back to the mid-eighteenth century. The noun was complemented with a verb, “to shop,” in the early nineteenth century, signaling the growing prevalence of an activity that included examining, searching for, and buying goods. The etymological history of “patronize” is longer and carries a more extensive list of connotations. The word patron, the origins of which are ecclesiastical, was adopted into English from French, around the fourteenth century, to signify anyone “standing in a role of oversight, protection, or sponsorship to another.” Early in the nineteenth century, the intensifying commercial activity that produced the verb “to shop” also birthed a new kind of patron, the one who favors or supports a business with one’s custom.Footnote 60 Thus, semantically, “to patronize” carries a heavier responsibility than “to shop.” While shopping denotes a set of simple actions, patronizing signifies a position of power. It is exactly this supposed power African American editors were appealing to when they chose to utilize the verb “to patronize” for explicit political purposes.
Furthermore, “to patronize” lacked the gendered connotation associated with shopping, thus signaling that men as well as women were expected to partake in this racial commercial endeavor. Historian D’Weston Haywood argues that “black people’s ideas, rhetoric, and strategies for black protest and racial advancement … grew out of a quest for proper black manhood led by black newspapers.” Focusing on the struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century, Haywood determines that Black editors and publishers interpreted and presented key moments in the freedom struggle through a gendered lens and, thus, signaled to their male readers that they “should stand up and be ‘men.’”Footnote 61 The insistence to delineate a difference between patronage and shopping marks an early example of these tendencies. If shopping was commonly understood as feminine, then any act of buying that relied on the participation of men had to be framed differently. Mixing the terminology might imply that support of Black businesses and, by implication, the economic uplift of the community, was a woman’s work. By using the verb “to patronize,” Black editors carved out an enclave within the consumer arena that was not exclusively feminine and boosted male participation or even leadership. (Figure 2)
Figure 2. Only “Negro” store of its kind in the United States, at 2933 State Street, Chicago, Illinois, circa 1899. African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Patronizing Black businesses was at the core of self-help philosophy. Theoretically, this act had the power to uplift the race. The responsibility was not just implied by the verb choice; it was stated explicitly. “Very often, too, the colored patron or rather ought-to-be patron, loses sight of everything about the enterprise of a member of his race,” professed the Denver Star in an essay from 1915, originally published by the Dallas Express. “He should remember,” the unsigned op-ed continued, that “when he refuses to patronize a Negro place of business, the very first effect is to lessen the employing capacity of the concern, thereby lessening the number of colored boys and girls who might be given work.”Footnote 62 A similar message was delivered by the Advocate in 1909:
What follows is written solely for the benefit of those of our local readers … in quest of a way to add their mite to the advancement of the race … There are in Charleston, conducted by Negroes, a number of businesses … The Negro population of Charleston is about five thousand. Suppose one-tenth of those would spend two dollars each week for necessities at the [Black] grocery and fifty cents at the [Black] drug store … Is it not clear that additional help would be required to accommodate the increased patronage? Would places not be open for the ambitious boys and girls of the race, who now, perforce, can secure only the most menial employment?Footnote 63
While the racial liability is obvious, other lessons are implied. Notice the choice of words: the Black patron spends money, has expenditures, receive credit. Later on in the same text, he “pays for wares,” and also “takes his trade elsewhere.” He does not shop. Shopping is a different activity, whose essence is unrelated to the political message delivered by this piece and others like it.
Despite the lexical difference embraced by the Black press on a day-to-day basis, the verbs “to shop” and “to patronize” denoted the same commercial action that ultimately bounded both verbs, as well as the meanings assigned to them by editors, to the consumer arena. While newspapers chose to distinguish between a leisurely shopping stroll and purposeful patronage, readers did not necessarily absorb this separation. In a letter to the editor of the Afro-American, written in 1915, reader Amelia Johnson wished to express her frustration. She was “stunned” to read an editorial, admonishing members of the race who prefer to spend their money in white-owned businesses. According to Johnson, “a little consideration on the part of the Editor will show him that he is unmistakably wrong.” She explained that “the colored people are not shopping with the white man’s stores because of any idea of superiority of the white man, but because of the goods he offers for sale. They patronize his stores only because they get there the wares they need, and at the prices they are able to pay.”Footnote 64 To Johnson, shopping and patronizing were interchangeable. Unintentionally, she was critiquing the editor’s semantic choices in addition to his moral point of view. Her own choice of words makes sense not only because of the colloquial use of the two verbs. Even though editors of Black newspapers rarely included both words in the same item, they too could not suspend the common commercial mission behind shopping and patronizing. Almost every week in most Black papers, one page was dedicated to advertisements alerting “city-shoppers” or “holiday shoppers” to “shop here” at “our shop.” The same page usually featured an accompanying message, printed in bold letters, calling readers to “patronize the firms that patronize us.”
The percentage of Black Americans living in cities grew from 27 percent in 1916 to 35 percent in 1920 to 44 percent by 1930. The urban surroundings, as well as the fact many of these migrants were wage earners, increased their exposure to and engagement with consumer culture.Footnote 65 With time, the politicization of the consumer arena only intensified. Indeed, organizations such as the National Negro Business League and, particularly, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, amplified calls for a separate Black economy. Additionally, the growing presence of Black Americans in consumer spaces also amplified racial tensions and expressions of white racist hostility. These developments were manifested on the pages of the Black press. To begin with, the massive influx of African Americans into cities also entailed more potential readers. Indeed, following World War I, urban-based papers such as the Pittsburgh Courier increased their circulation and began printing weekly issues of twenty pages or more.Footnote 66 The space dedicated to consumption also grew – there were more jokes, more consumer etiquette pieces, more advice to shoppers, more reports on new businesses either owned by Black people or welcoming them, and many more calls for consumer activism. For Black consumers, the ubiquitous discourse about patronizing, shopping, buying, or not buying signaled that “the commercial realm was a viable battleground to fight for rights.”Footnote 67 By the classic era of the Civil Rights Movement, boycotts and department store sit-ins became rudimentary tools for struggle, alongside marches and rallies.
In his book about Black Americans in the advertising industry, Jason Chambers argues that, during the twentieth century, “African American advocates of the Black consumer market gradually shifted from emphasizing the presence of Black consumers to white business leaders,” in the 1920s and 1930s, “to stressing the pressure those consumers could create on a company or industry when they acted as a cohesive force,” from the 1940s onward.Footnote 68 However, before such emphasis and pressure could be put or applied, there had to be enough Black consumers to present a significant economic force. Surveying the conversation surrounding African American consumption within the Progressive Era, it becomes apparent there was an earlier, preliminary process that predated Chambers’s timeline. Before the 1920s, African American advocates of the Black consumer market were busy imagining and encouraging the formation of such a market.
The origins of this preliminary process trace back to the turn of the century, when a budding Black upper class marked participation in the consumer arena as desirable. In the Black press, which was written for and read by the Black aspiring classes, shopping, or patronizing Black-owned stores, was presented as a foundational activity for racial advancement. These practices were associated with respectable conduct, normative gender behavior, and good taste, as well as self-help, solidarity, and the accumulation of racial capital. During those years, the nascent African American discourse was embedded within a broader national conversation that similarly encouraged engagement with the consumer arena. Together, these conversations helped push more and more Black people into consumer spaces, while nurturing an expectation for luxurious, courteous, or at least fair service. As many studies have shown, unlike the fables produced by the press, out in the real world, the consumer arena was not particularly welcoming to Black shoppers. Therefore, paying attention to the early African American consumption discourse might also explain how, in later decades, the gap between the expectations fostered by the press and reality served as an effective catalyst for political consciousness.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Rachel Funtowicz for providing reseach assistance as well as crucial feedback. Thank you also to Oded Erez, Sivan Balslev, Jan Logemann, Nimisha Barton, Traci Parker, and three anonymous readers, who read and commented on earlier versions of this article. This study was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation.
Competing interest
The author declares none.
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