For much of the twentieth century, Traci Parker explains, department stores were key sites of black activism because they “enthroned consumption as the route to democracy and citizenship” but simultaneously operated as “Jim Crow institutions” (p. 3). In Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement, she chronicles the department store movement in which African Americans fought for equal employment and shopper experiences. Over five decades, they targeted stores such as Macy's, Hecht's, and Sears, through organizations like the New Negro Alliance and Citizens’ League for Fair Play, across multiple urban centers, including Chicago, Detroit, Manhattan, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Baltimore, and Richmond. Historians have certainly examined black protests against department stores; they have not, however, contextualized them within or conceptualized them as the sustained movement that Parker assiduously tracks through newspapers, advertisements, oral histories, court cases, and government, organizational, business, and personal records.

Parker defines department stores as spaces of race and class identity formation. Their rise during the early twentieth century transformed shopping into a glamorous and social leisure experience, characterized by doting service and numerous amenities and amusements, including minstrel shows. Engineered “to satisfy the needs and desires of middle-class whites,” these “palaces” of consumption limited black employment and discriminated against black consumers (p. 3). Yet, they were also “a key site for the inception of a modern black middle-class” (p. 5). In the first of six chapters, Parker argues that their consumerism in these spaces allowed African Americans to “reinvent themselves” as modern, middle-class Americans and to challenge “their subservient position in society” (p. 44).

Black consumer experiences and aspirations are inherent to Parker's study, but African Americans’ efforts to break employment barriers were clearly the crux of the department store movement and, therefore, the primary focus of the remaining chapters. White-collar department store jobs offered the societal status and economic resources vital to black upward mobility. White and ethnic-white (namely Jewish) department store ownership, however, went to great lengths to keep African Americans out of these positions. Before World War I, department stores hired blacks only for unskilled jobs, but for the token black salesclerk or elevator operator. So remarkable was the hiring of African Americans to white-collar positions in these stores that the black press wildly reported on it.

In chapter 2, “Before Montgomery,” Parker contextualizes the “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work” campaigns within the 1930s rise of the department store movement, when civil rights and labor organizations came together to pressure department stores to hire and promote more black personnel. Historian Lizabeth Cohen argues that the objective of African Americans’ consumer activism during the Depression era was to improve their role as producers (A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America [2003]). Parker claims the much larger goal of “dismantling the racial and economic barriers that circumscribed all black lives” (p. 57).

During the 1940s, African Americans took advantage of wartime discourses of freedom and employee shortages and compelled numerous department stores to adopt merit hiring. As for the postwar period, this book gives new dimension to the story of black activism in consumer spaces during the civil rights movement. Parker reveals how black department store workers aided activists targeting their places of employment and how black department store consumers and white-collar employees supported each other. She frames these alliances using Michael Dawson's concept of “linked fate,” in which African Americans’ shared experience of second-class citizenship encouraged collective action for individual gain (p. 150).

In the latter half of the twentieth century, several dynamics converged to determine how department stores and the department store movement fared. These included the downsizing of department store personnel, the proliferation of suburban shopping centers, and the rise of the civil rights movement and protest actions against discriminatory retailers. Just as African Americans achieved greater white-collar employment in department stores, those positions began to lose status. Moreover, beginning in the 1960s, department stores increasingly retreated to shopping malls in the suburbs, to flee protests and urban riots, which made them less accessible to blacks for employment or consumption. The story concludes with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's botched discrimination cases against Sears in the 1980s and the ascendance of discount stores like Walmart in the 1990s. With their decline, department stores no longer provided a promising route to economic stability and class mobility, and the black movement that had centered on these former “palaces” ended.

Parker demonstrates that without their consistent organizing and protest, African Americans’ white-collar employment in retail would not have risen above tokenism. She also illuminates the complex color and class dynamics of campaigns within the movement. Organizers often selected and trained educated, “respectable” African Americans to break department stores’ employment barriers. Parker warns, however, that it would be a mistake to view the movement as middle class; rather, it was often the case that collective gains “could be secured only by African Americans who were exemplars of middle-class respectability” (p. 56).

This book belongs to the long civil rights movement school: it identifies antecedents to the civil rights movement and expands the struggle beyond the South and the goal of integration. Its temporal and geographical range, however, distinguishes it within “long movement” scholarship, which typically focuses on a particular campaign in a particular locale. Most significantly, Parker achieves her goal of “reorient[ing] the long civil rights movement paradigm” by revealing that “black economic power and self-determination” were consistent priorities of the movement (p. 14).

Readers may find themselves struggling at times to keep track of the many different stores and numerous organizations, and their actions and acronyms, as Parker moves across cities and sometimes back and forth in time. This, however, is the nature of the beast she harnessed in reconstructing this complex history. Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement greatly expands understanding of African Americans’ relationship to the market as consumers, workers, and activists.