The Post-Reconstruction Era: 1880 - 1930:

 

Where Reconstruction witnessed African American political leadership and, in many places in South Carolina, political control, Post-Reconstruction was a time of African American disenfranchisement through official and unofficial discrimination. Jim Crow legislation, labor segregation, public surveillance, and political exclusion all served to perpetuate an existing racist ideology and social structure. Prevalent racist social thought in the South, and an assumed superiority, are evidenced in the way some European American historians of post-Reconstruction wrote about the end of Reconstruction. “After the desolation of the war, interest in art naturally suffered for some years,” wrote historian Harriet M. Salley of Columbia in 1936, “but with the restoration of white control, the indomitable spirit of Columbians soon asserted itself and gradually there was a revival of interest in” the arts and music (Salley 1936:186, emphasis added). W. B. Nash, a prominent African American member of the South Carolina Republican party, observed that reconstruction and military rule in South Carolina had little effect on dominant White ideology; White Southerners were “not conquered—not changed” (in Moore 1993:253).

The Post-Reconstruction era witnessed the growth of a full market economy and the development of brand names, distinctive packaging, labor unions, electric trolleys, telephones, home electricity, and national advertising and marketing (Spencer-Wood 1987; Strasser 1989). As the variety and availability of consumer goods increased throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so too did the opportunities for consumers to re-appropriate the meanings of mass-produced goods. Material goods became the dominant mode of cultural expression, where objects worked to create personal connections to larger spheres of cultural meaning (Grier 1988). This newly emerging consumer space became a key arena for the White Southern creation of, and African American resistance to, a culture of segregation (Hale 1998). Segregation increasingly became an ideological war fought within the spaces of consumption (Weems 1998).

Segregation and Jim Crow legislation—what historian Robert Weems (1998) has called ‘American apartheid’—came in two fundamental forms: as a legal structure and as social custom (the “etiquette” of Jim Crow) (Packard 2002). Fundamental to Jim Crow was the principle that any White person was superior to every Black person, regardless of wealth, education, or status. Under the illusion of “sameness” and “separate but equal,” the goal of Jim Crow was to separate African Americans from White society; “The etiquette of race represented an obligatory ritual to keep whites in mind of their first-class rank and blacks of their second-class standing” (Packard 2002:165). Hale (1998) suggests that segregation became the foundation of Southern society and “the central metaphor of Southern life” because it balanced White demand for social superiority and the spread of a national marketplace. Consumer culture, Hale argues, created spaces that both explicitly and implicitly challenged segregation.

Consumer space became a site of uneasy contention because at the same time White Southerners proclaimed their superiority over African Americans, these same White business owners needed African American customers. This contention between White oppression and African American aspiration is clearly visible in advertising, where African Americans were more often than not the objects, and not subjects, of consumer desire (Hale 1998). By the early twentieth century, the goal of advertising had shifted from a means of providing product information to an attempt to influence buyers (Strasser 1989). “The most effective [advertising] campaigns,” writes Susan Strasser (1989:95), “encouraged new needs and new habits … by linking the rapid appearance of new products with the rapid changes in all areas of social and cultural life.”

On regional and national scales, the advertising industry presented product advertisements that blatantly caricaturized, demeaned, and disrespected African America (Weems 1998). Products were marketed with names that included such derogatory terms as “mammy,” “pickaninny,” “coon,” and “nigger” (Weems 1998). Advertisements commonly featured African Americans with exaggerated physical features, ridiculous clothes, and speaking in dialect (Figure 1). Marketers often portrayed African Americans in subservient positions to Whites and ridiculed African Americans with social aspirations as mimicking Whites or misusing technology (Figure 2) (Hale 1998). While prevalent, this disregard for African American sensibilities did not extend to all products and companies. For example, when Kellogg’s began an aggressive campaign in the 1930s to attract more consumers to Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, they widely advertised in the African American press (Weems 1998). By and large, however, advertisers had turned the stereotype of African America into a commodity to sell goods and services.

Although marketers attempted to reach a broad cross section of American society through advertising, most Americans at the turn-of-the-twentieth century still bought unlabeled goods such as sugar, flour, salt, soap and vinegar from bulk containers at local or general stores (Strasser 1989). African Americans were routinely subjected to second-class treatment in retail establishments. The rise of a mass market, and the shopping options it afforded, changed the nature of the relationship between consumer and retailer. With a national market came a greater separation between consumer and retailer that facilitated an individuality and identity often not available from local stores. While consumer space was never free from racial bias, African Americans and other marginalized groups were able to employ various consumption strategies that undermined the White population’s singular claim to the privileges of citizenship (Mullins 1999b).

The national mass-market brought with it branded goods, a one-price principle, mail-order retailers, and chain stores (Strasser 1989). Brand-name goods were often used by African Americans as a social negotiation strategy. By linking a commodity to a symbolic ‘national’ market and identity, brand-name goods provided African Americans an effective strategy for evading the racism of local marketers. Conducting research on African American consumer behaviors in 1932, Paul Edwards noted:

In purchasing foods in bulk she [the African American female consumer] often not only suspects short weight, but has no way to assure herself as to quality. North and South the Negro all too often has been victimized by unscrupulous merchants. Brands have come to be relied on to provide protection in buying (in Weems 1998:26).

Brand names stood for the consumer’s expectation of product quality. Companies produced standardized products to win consumer trust and sell more products. Brand name goods offered consumers a new kind of control over local surveillance and discrimination.

African Americans frequently used mail-order houses and chain stores to avoid second-class treatment from local marketers. In the South, chain stores were commonly associated with equitable treatment, since,

“It was traditional in the South, particularly in small cities, for Negro customers, upon entering a store, to wait until all white people were served before advancing to the clerks to make known their wants. The chains came along with a standard service for all customers and changed this condition overnight” (in Weems 1998:18).

Compared with local retail stores, chain stores were more likely to place social relations on an economic basis rather than a racial basis (Hale 1998). Likewise, by the late nineteenth century, mail-order outlets served to integrate individual consumers into the mass market and provided African Americans with an effective strategy for evading the racism of local marketers. Sears, Roebuck, and Company and Montgomery Ward provided a large array of products and gave access to the national market and a national identity without racial deference or a storekeeper’s prerogative in determining the quality of goods a consumer would receive (Hale 1998; Strasser 1989). Attempting to preserve cultural identities and foster social empowerment while at the same time challenging a hegemonic White social structure, in the 1920s and 1930s the National Negro Business League urged African American consumers to avoid White establishments altogether and “Buy Something From a Negro Merchant!” (Weems 1998:17).

-Jakob D. Crockett