African American Women and the Sears, Roebuck, and Company Cases

“Sear[s] Roebuck and Company failed to promote me to department assistant manager because of my race, Negro and sex, female, yet I trained the white male who was promoted,” Geraldine H. Harris wrote in her formal charge of discrimination to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).  In its investigation into Harris’s charge, the EEOC determined that she was indeed a victim of race and sex discrimination.  Yet it declined to include her case, and others like it, in its sex discrimination lawsuit or race discrimination lawsuits against Sears in 1979.  As a result, the Sears sex case and four race cases grappled primarily with white working-class women’s issues and discrimination and African American men’s charges of discrimination respectively.  But what about black women’s grievances?  My paper considers the Sears cases and their implications for black working women.  Using corporate and government records, it argues that these cases held the potential for advancing fair employment and affirmative action policies and propelling black women into the middle class.  But the Sears cases ultimately failed to meet this end, leaving black women to take up the struggle.  The EEOC was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to understand the five-decade movement to integrate department-store work and consumption – an endeavor for and by African Americans, most often led by its female members – or recognize the “intersectionality” of black women’s oppression.  This paper aims to broaden our understanding of black women's struggle for economic freedom in the post-Civil Rights era.