The Hagley Library recently acquired important pieces related to the history of African American business. Founded in Kansas City, Missouri, the Colored Mail Order Corporation of America was opened 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. It also includes housewares, and one page offering “bargains for the very young” includes coats, beanies, two-piece suits, and overalls. Just two pages offer men’s apparel, depicting suits, button-ups, slacks, and shoes.
On the accompanying broadsheet, the Colored Mail Order Corporation notes the high quality of their products and services. The broadsheet lists the company's seven guarantees to customers and provides testimonials and endorsements from doctors, teachers, and other community leaders. It also 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 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 full catalog will be posted online when we launch the new Hagley Digital Archives this summer. In the meantime, please contact askhagley@hagley.org with any questions.
Kevin Martin is the Chief Curator of Library Collections at Hagley Museum and Library.