Black Grocers, Black Activism, and the Spaces in Between
There is a dearth of scholarly material and archival sources on Black-owned grocery stores that operated in the American South during the Jim Crow era. While historians such as Thomas Clark traveled throughout the South during the early twentieth century visiting White-owned grocery stores and collecting ledgers, receipts, and/or inventory records from store owners, nothing similar was done to preserve the history and importance of Black-owned grocery stores for the field of business history. This paper aims to demonstrate the centrality of Black-owned grocery stores to Black communities during the Jim Crow era.
The paper centers Black-owned grocery stores and their owners as cornerstones of Black communities while also examining the community voids created when these stores closed for a variety of reasons. I show that Black grocery stores, like other pivotal black-owned spaces such as Black funeral homes, undergirded Black activism by serving as a site for clandestine planning and organizing of activities to challenge white supremacy. Moreover, these stores provided a space for leisure and safety for African Americans. Because of the stores’ utility in the effort for African Americans to gain full citizenship, white competitors and supremacists often targeted Black-owned grocery stores via domestic terrorism such as bombing, arson, and shooting, and this paper documents that history. The paper will use oral histories and archival material to support the arguments presented.
