Every year I give a lecture on the history of retail in which Sears, central to American shopping for a century, plays a starring role. On Monday, when Sears filed for bankruptcy protection, I got a little wistful — not because I was particularly attached to the company, but because of the largely unsung role of its iconic catalog in helping African-Americans evade the injustices and humiliations of the Jim Crow era.

Historians typically date the Jim Crow era to the Mississippi Plan of 1890, which amended Mississippi’s Constitution to allow the disenfranchisement of African-Americans. But the true onset of this era came earlier, and it started with shopping. In 1883, the Supreme Court voided the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had banned discrimination in public businesses like theaters, restaurants, trains and shops. The loss of political rights, then, followed the loss of consumer rights. Jim Crow was active white resistance to black people’s freedom both at the ballot box and at the local shop.

Every time black Southerners went to a local store, they were forced to wait as white customers were served first. Serving white customers before black ones might seem a relatively small insult, but behind that racial ordering was an omnipresent threat of violence. Products in these stores reminded black shoppers that whites did not consider them deserving of human dignity: Grotesque caricatures of black faces were used as a “humorous” way to sell toothpaste, soap and nearly anything else; far more harrowing, with the rise of public “spectacle” lynching in the 1890s, black people could find the charred remains of lynching victims for sale alongside postcards commemorating the event.

Waiting for service was not mere discrimination. It was part of a larger world of white violence.

Then there was the matter of buying items on credit. Farmers, white and black, depended on credit to survive until the harvest. Credit came through small general stores, where the (white) shopkeeper would decide what you were allowed to buy. Black sharecroppers would often be in perpetual debt to a store, which was often owned by their landlord and employer. The credit price for goods, higher than the cash price, always managed to leave sharecroppers a little in the red even after they were paid for their crops. This debt system bound black farmers to the land in an almost feudal fashion. Adding insult to injury, black people were often even not allowed to purchase the same quality clothes as white people.