As we've heard this week, after over 130 years, Sears filed for bankruptcy and is closing 142 of its struggling stores.

But before it was known as a brick-and-mortar business, it was known as a catalog that reflected American consumerism and shaped American tastes.

Lewis Hyman is an economic historian and professor at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

On Monday, he tweeted,

In my history of consumption class, I teach about Sears.

But what most people don't know is just how radical the catalog was in the era of

Jim Crow. We were intrigued. Louis, let's begin at the local country store. Yeah, in the 1890s,

1900, most African-Americans were still living in the country, not until 1960 or more African-Americans living in the cities.

And they lived as sharecroppers. They lived as tenant farmers. And when they shop, they shopped at the local country store.

That was a place that gave them access to a wider world of goods, access to credit, which they needed

because they were only paid once a year when the harvest came in, just like white farmers

as well. But they had a very unequal access to the space. Of course, it was the era of Jim Crow,

which started in 1890 in Mississippi. Describe how that plays out in the real world.

The trick with Jim Crow was that it was everywhere all the time.

And when African Americans would go into a train station, into a country store anywhere, really,

they would have to wait until all white patrons were served first.

When they were eventually got help in the store, now it's important to realize that the country store wasn't like stores today where you serve yourself.

You go from aisle to aisle.

Everything has to be done by a clerk at the counter who decides whether or not you actually deserve what you're asking for because

it's all in credit. So the shopkeeper decides if you're the kind of person who should have

that quality of shirt or not. And African Americans didn't really have much choice. This is

the only place they could shop where they could get credit.

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