The Hagley Library recently acquired an important piece related to the history of African American business. The Colored Mail Order Corporation of America was founded in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1939 by journalist and businessman Chester Arthur Franklin, and exclusively employed Black workers to fill orders and model products. The material purchased by Hagley includes a company catalog, a broadsheet, and an order form.
The catalog titled “Let’s March Forward Together,” includes clothing for women, with a range of coats, dresses, sweaters, gloves, lingerie, underwear, shoes, and more. The catalog also includes housewares and one page offers “bargains for the very young,” includes coats, beanies, two-piece suits, and overalls. Just two pages offer men’s apparel, including suits, button-ups, slacks, and shoes.
The broadsheet, attests to the high quality of products and services from the Colored Mail Order Corporation. It lists the company's seven guarantees to customers and provides testimonials and endorsements from doctors, teachers, and other community leaders. The flier highlights the “hundreds of highly encouraging letters” from customers. One customer stated, they “pulse with pride over” the company's “effort to establish a race enterprise.”
Emphasizing the their contribution to racial uplift, the broadsheet informs would-be customers that “if you want more jobs for yourselves and your children, if you want greater opportunity for training in business, if you realize that colored people must provide for their own economic growth and security through mutual cooperation, you will be vitally interested in this message and the catalogue it introduces.”
The below images include the cover of the catalog and both sides of the broadsheet.
The full catalog will be posted online when we launch the new Hagley Digital Archives in the summer. In the meantime, please contact research@hagley.org with any questions.
Kevin Martin is the Curator of Library Collections at the Hagley Library