Main Body-42(1) 88 89PAUL R. MULLINS—Marketing in a Multicultural Neighborhood Paul R. Mullins Marketing in a Multicultural Neighborhood: An Archaeology of Corner Stores in the Urban Midwest ABSTRACT Corner stores were the most common consumer outlet in the urban Midwest from the mid-19th century until World War II. In the early-20th century in Indianapolis, Indiana, the near westside was dotted with more than 100 modest stores managed by African Americans, European immigrants, and white Hoosiers. Archaeological excavation of a ca. 1889–1969 store illuminates the widespread entrepreneurial ambition of urban newcomers, the increasing ethnic insularity of corner stores between 1900 and 1920, and the eventual decline of corner stores in the face of urban renewal and the arrival of chain stores in the 1930s. “Those Who Strive”: Ambition, Entrepreneurship, and the Color Line On 26 December 1927, the Walker Theatre Center in Indianapolis, Indiana, was unveiled. General Manager Freeman Ransom announced that the theater complex was dedicated to “those who toil; to those who think; to those who strive readily; ... to all classes; to all races” (Gibson- Hudson 1989:4). Ransom’s celebration of ambi- tion and accomplishment reflected the American Dream pursued by many residents of the city’s near westside, including C. J. Walker herself. Walker arrived in Indianapolis in 1910 and launched a business selling her hair care remedies and beauty supplies. Walker became enormously successful by training women to become Walker “agents” who would teach women Walker beauty techniques and sell the firm’s goods. Walker first envisioned a black theater and commercial center for Indianapolis after she was denied admission to a local theater. After her death in 1919, her daughter A’Lelia completed the project (Bundles 2001:161). The Walker Theatre complex on Indiana Avenue featured a stylistically stunning theater rendered in a unique union of Afrocentric and Art Deco styles. Today, the Walker Theatre is best known for this architecture. Despite its unique architectural aesthetics, the building’s primary significance was as a center for black commerce. Businesses, shops, and the Walker Manufacturing Company occupied the center at the most prominent intersection in black Indianapolis. Beyond simply housing businesses, the Walker was the city’s primary black social space. Its grand ballroom hosted innumerable social events; the Coffee Pot was a well-known courting spot and late-night meeting place; and the offices throughout the center housed the city’s most prominent black professionals. As in many other American cities, consumer venues and districts like Indiana Avenue were among the community’s most significant social spaces, serv- ing narrowly defined economic functions while they also provided a profoundly consequential shared sociocultural experience. The Walker loomed over a mile-long stretch of African American businesses and clubs that was the heart of black Indianapolis from the late-19th century into the 1960s. Entrepreneurs who shared many of Madam Walker’s own aspirations ran this concentration of consumer venues. Like many of the Europeans who migrated to Indianapolis and lived in the same neighborhoods at the turn of the century, many African Americans were quite committed to American Dream ideology and saw entrepre- neurship and consumer space as their foothold into American society. Many of these arrivals to Indianapolis’s near westside optimistically lived out citizen aspirations and material ambitions much like Walker’s, yet racism and xenopho- bia profoundly complicated their aspirations. In Indianapolis, African American arrivals and most Europeans found that provincial Indiana whites erected complex boundaries to the newcomers’ rather commonplace material ambitions. With a partisan municipal government dominated by anti-black party politics and most public space governed by de facto racial and ethnic segrega- tion, many near westside residents found their foothold into American society as shopkeepers and consumers. The distinctive neighborhood marketing networks that emerged throughout Historical Archaeology, 2008, 42(1):88–96. Permission to reprint required. 88 89PAUL R. MULLINS—Marketing in a Multicultural Neighborhood the near westside mirrored and profoundly influ- enced dynamic class and color lines, forming one of the most important influences on com- munity identities. It might seem crass to place entrepreneurship and shopping at the heart of community identity, but it would be impossible to understand life in Indianapolis without devot- ing considerable attention to the merchants and consumers who frequented the near westside’s hundreds of stores and clubs. In summer 2000, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis conducted excavations at an 1890–1969 corner store at 800 Camp Street, a block away from the Walker Theater. The store was typical of those in the near westside and much like those operated by budding entrepre- neurs throughout the country. A small enterprise in a roughly 800 sq. ft. building, the store sold everything from coal to candy and was managed by a long line of marketers that included whites and then African Americans. Most research on turn-of-the-century marketing has focused on department stores, mail-order sales, and adver- tising. Such shifts in sales clearly impacted how consumer desire was marketed and experienced. Yet, most everyday consumption in the urban Midwest was conducted in much less grand, local venues like corner groceries. These insti- tutions and storekeepers assumed prominent social roles in many marginalized communities. In Indianapolis, for instance, African Americans and German immigrants alike cherished entrepre- neurial spirit, dotted the community with both ambitious and modest enterprises, and granted marketers considerable social prominence. The Camp Street assemblage and the history of neighboring marketers underscore the similar ambitions and material worlds of many white Hoosiers (the local term for Indiana residents), European immigrants, and African Americans, despite the persistent power of racist ideology. For many marginalized citizens, such as African Americans and European immigrants, entrepre- neurialism was a mechanism through which new citizens could secure social and material empowerment in a society that valued the self- made entrepreneur, individual ambition, and materialism. As Madam Walker herself found out, even astounding entrepreneurial success and wealth could not secure some rights across color or gender lines. African Americans often were compelled to contest the implicit racialization of consumer space. In the 1930s, for instance, Walker’s former lawyer, Freeman Ransom, led a committee that identified more than 100 gro- ceries and 40 drugstores in predominately black neighborhoods that had no black employees (Thornbrough 2000:76). Churches and women’s clubs led pickets against the most egregious offenders and urged African Americans to take their business elsewhere. Nevertheless, many Americans remained invested in the ideological notion that marketing and entrepreneurialism could secure material and social stability, if not genuine affluence. These merchants and their customers in the near westside of Indianapolis lived in a community in which modest corner stores and consumer spaces lay at the heart of community identity and reflected the complex position of many marginalized Americans seek- ing a foothold into American society. Marketing and Multiculturalism in Indianapolis A few African Americans began to settle in Indianapolis in the second quarter of the 19th century, and they clustered along Indiana Avenue in the city’s near westside. Indiana Avenue was one of four diagonal thorough- fares that extended from the central circle of Indianapolis’s “mile square” grid plan, but the avenue’s western reaches were not considered particularly desirable areas. The western stretch of Indiana Avenue was marshy lowland, not far from the White River and Fall Creek, and some areas were poorly drained and prone to flooding. After 1839 the Central Canal crossed Indiana Avenue and almost immediately became an unpleasant open sewer that never fulfilled its intended function as a transportation corridor. The canal became an informally recognized boundary, separating the city to the east and the near westside to the west. Over the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the near westside became a complex ethnic mosaic that included pockets of virtually every European immigrant group that came to America. The first settlers in the near westside included many German and Irish immigrants who quickly established businesses along Indi- ana Avenue. A handful of African Americans lived throughout the same neighborhoods prior to the Civil War. In 1865 Samuel Smothers’s 90 HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 42(1) 91PAUL R. MULLINS—Marketing in a Multicultural Neighborhood grocery store became the first of many African American businesses along the avenue. Outside Indiana Avenue, the near westside contained mainly residential neighborhoods, punctuated by corner stores, a few social spaces like churches and schools, and several industrial workplaces along the White River. Spaces that might reasonably be called ethnic neighborhoods were slow to emerge in the 19th-century near westside. In a few single blocks, most residents were from the same ethnic group, such as Afri- can Americans who settled around black schools or Irish immigrants who lived along the White River within walking distance of the Kingan’s meatpacking plant. Waves of migration around the time of the Civil War, at the turn of the century, and in the early 1920s delivered new neighbors from the South and various reaches of Europe, but white Hoosiers remained the most common group across the near westside until the 1920s. Most Indianapolis neighborhoods did not assume clear racial and ethnic segregation until the 1920s, when de facto racism, city-sanc- tioned codes, and the local rise of the Ku Klux Klan fueled increasingly clear spatial and social distinctions among white, European, and black residents. In the late-19th century, in contrast, near westside residents routinely were served by local marketers from other ethnic groups, a situation that became increasingly uncommon after the turn of the century. By 1900 Indiana Avenue had a string of stores and clubs that formed black Indianap- olis’s central business and leisure district. The strategically placed area became a magnet for African Americans migrating northward. For those African Americans migrating overland from Kentucky, Indianapolis was the first major northern city along the north-south artery, and many stopped at Indiana Avenue to settle in the area. The residential neighborhoods that fanned off Indiana Avenue included the area now known as Ransom Place. First divided into lots in 1865, Ransom Place’s six-block historic area is today the only surviving remnant of the near westside’s 19th-century neighborhoods. Like most of the near westside, Ransom Place was predominately residential; however, the neighbor- hood did include a few corner stores, a couple of churches, and a scatter of small businesses along the busily trafficked West Street, which was one of the main northbound roadways through the city. The Ransom Place neighbor- hood eventually became home for many mem- bers of the African American elite, including Madam Walker’s lawyer Freeman Ransom, for whom the neighborhood is named. Between 1900 and 1910, Ransom Place began to be segregated along black-white lines, and the remainder of Indianapolis was starkly drawn into black and white neighborhoods in the subsequent decade. In 1900, 14% of Ransom Place’s population was black, which was slightly higher than the city’s rate of about 10%. By 1910, nearly 10% of Indianapolis’s 22,000 residents were African Americans, the highest percentage of African Americans in any city north of the Ohio River, and two-thirds of Ransom Place residents were black. In 1920 that figure had ballooned to 96% in Ransom Place, a testament to how thoroughly segregated the city became within a quarter cen- tury (Brady 1996). At the heart of these emergent neighborhoods was a vast number of small groceries catering to the immediate vicinity. Small corner stores were typical features of the urban landscape in most late-19th- and early-20th-century cities. From a functional perspective, such venues simply pro- vided essential goods in densely settled urban communities. Stores also had profound social significance because of their roles in structuring neighborhood identities and providing important spaces for entrepreneurial ambition. Much of the corner store explosion came at the very moment that many central features of a consumer culture were emerging. Department stores, advertising, chain stores, and public leisure were simply the most visible signals of how late-19th-cen- tury citizen rights became invested in material- ism. Corner stores should not be considered in isolation from such transformations. Many self-made marketers tried establishing grocery stores because of their modest scale and the widespread demand for their products. In 1899, W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1899:117) survey of African American businesses in Philadelphia found few grocery stores owned by African Americans, but Du Bois still concluded that the “ambition of the middle class of Negroes lies in this direction ... . the number of Negro groceries will undoubtedly grow considerably in the next decade.” In 1914, 50 of 255 businesses in Indi- anapolis’s near westside were groceries, includ- ing at least 10 run by African Americans. In 90 HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 42(1) 91PAUL R. MULLINS—Marketing in a Multicultural Neighborhood 1932, Paul Edwards (1932:121) canvassed nine Southern cities and identified 650 grocery stores out of 1,145 total retail establishments. Grocery stores were the most common African American establishment in each of the nine cities. Several corner stores were established in the Ransom Place neighborhood, which was initially a predominately white Hoosier area, and these white residents included the first storekeepers at 800 Camp Street. Mary and William Smith ran the Camp Street store between 1890 and 1899. Like many marginalized marketers, the Smiths apparently spent some of their entrepreneurial lives as street peddlers selling goods from a wagon (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1990). An 1897 huckster’s license was recovered from deposits dating to the Smith’s occupation, a period when the city apparently licensed street peddling (Figure 1). Since William A. Smith appeared in mid-1890s city directories as either a salesman or canvasser, this may well have been his license. Many hucksters and corner store merchants appeared to share the optimism that every venture could provide the seeds of a marketing empire. Corner store merchants often used street peddling and small stores as steppingstones to grander enterprises. In typical fashion, the Smiths moved their store to the more profitable Indiana Avenue in 1899. The Smiths lived in the grocery store (roughly 800 sq. ft.), unlike most of the subsequent merchants, so it is problematic to distinguish between store products and the Smith household discards. The deposits dating to their occupation include high percentages of household goods, and at least some of these likely belonged to the Smiths. Most corner stores specialized in prepackaged goods in cans and bottles, and many corner stores carried at least a modest range of fresh foods. The Smith assemblage includes a handful of decorative goods. Flow- erpots, glass table vessels, and white-bodied ceramic settings would have given the home a modest hint of Victorian style, but such bric- a-brac and decorative goods might also have been sold in the store or distributed to custom- ers. The most unusual portion of the Smith assemblage was a concentration of ceramic tiles produced at the United States Encaustic Tile Works just a few blocks away. The Tile Works operated from 1877 until 1937 and specialized in ornamental tile like the 154 fragments litter- ing the Camp Street site (Hester 2001). Wil- liam Smith appeared in the 1880 census as a tile maker, so he likely was employed at the nearby tile works and brought the tiles to the site. The most distinctive characteristic of this tile assemblage is that very few tiles match each other in decorative style. The tiles include few matching colors, molded motifs, or even sizes. In an assemblage representing at least 133 tiles, only 18% matched the color or size of other tiles in the assemblage. It is unclear exactly how the tiles were being used; none are obvi- FIGURE 1. Apparently city-issued, this 1897 huckster’s license was to be worn by one of the many street peddlers in turn-of-the-century Indianapolis. (Photo by Paul R. Mullins.) 92 HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 42(1) 93PAUL R. MULLINS—Marketing in a Multicultural Neighborhood ous kiln wasters. Only 15 of the 133 tiles were complete, and almost none have any evidence of having been installed. Managing corner stores was one of the few entrepreneurial possibilities for women, and the Camp Street store, like many in Indianapolis, was run by women for much of its 70-year operation. During the two decades between 1890 and 1910, the store generally appeared in city directories in either Mary Smith’s or subsequent owner Mar- garet McGuffin’s name, and from 1911 to 1928 Martha Miller, a Canadian-born black, managed the store. Yet many stores probably run by women were listed in city directories under the husband’s name. In 1914, for example, only 4 of the near westside’s 50 groceries appeared in the directory under a woman’s name; however, many wives and daughters who appeared as clerks and store employees likely managed significant ele- ments of the store. The assemblage dating to the store’s African American management after 1910 does not reveal distinctive patterns that might be readily interpreted as ethnic identity. There is no clear evidence that the type of goods in the Camp Street store and similar African American corner venues was significantly different from that of white and European neighbors. However, the quantities, prices, store locations, and building conditions were in many cases quite different. Edwards (1932:126) studied African American consumers in the urban South in 1932 and concluded that African American groceries were often understocked and “consisted, in most cases, largely of staple canned and other non-perishable products.” Edwards (1932:131) characterized over half of Nashville’s African American grocery stores as being “either in a run-down and dilapidated condition, or … otherwise unattractive.” In 1933, Ira DeA. Reid (1933:279) concluded, “Negro areas are ones in which some of the most undesirable mer- chandising practices are conducted. The Negro consumer finds his neighborhood stores cluttered with a large supply of inferior and cheap goods at prices that are high under any standard.” A 1928 National Negro Business League survey of African American businesses found that 97.5% were located in “Negro neighborhoods,” mean- ing that their trade was overwhelmingly limited to African Americans (Edwards 1932:135). Edwards and many critics of black entrepre- neurship sometimes rhetorically overstated the dire conditions confronting African American grocers. Edwards, for instance, was a cham- pion of academic business training and sales experience, and many African American grocery owners had neither. Nevertheless, many African American groceries clearly were modest opera- tions in marginal locations. The Camp Street assemblage was composed almost entirely of standardized mass-produced commodities, but it also included an African- motif pot-metal brooch (ca. 1930) that signaled cultural and ethnic difference. The Afrocentric style brooch was typical of a flood of jew- elry modeled on dancer Josephine Baker, and Harlem Renaissance artists prior to the 1920s had championed elements of such African style. Wearing such motifs in public spaces was cer- tainly politicized, because nativism, xenophobia, and racism have had a persistent impression on local life. The most infamous expression of this nativism came in the mid-1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan ruled the Indianapolis city govern- ment and held powerful sway over state gov- ernment as well. Leonard Moore’s (1991:143) analysis of Klan membership in Indiana found that Klan ranks included many residents in the near westside. An astounding 17.6% of the city’s dues-paying Klansmen lived in the area, where better than one-third of adult males were black and significant numbers were Europeans and/or Catholics who were also excluded from Klan membership (Moore 1991:142–143). The Klan’s $10.00 initiation fee alone was equal to one-quarter or more of most men’s weekly incomes, and ongoing membership fees made joining the hooded order an even more expen- sive proposition (Moore 1991:63). Even after the Klan’s downfall in the late-1920s, racists continued to have a strong hold on most city politics and public services, devising racially based real-estate codes and school regulations that still profoundly shape Indianapolis settle- ment patterns. Consequently, the near westside’s mix of white Hoosiers, African Americans, and Europeans did not necessarily signal a particu- larly settled multicultural community. In this atmosphere, the Camp Street brooch served a quite meaningful notice of its wearer’s identity in relation to African American culture and anti- black racism. 92 HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 42(1) 93PAUL R. MULLINS—Marketing in a Multicultural Neighborhood In 1910 Maurice L. Shaffer and Louis W. Butler became the first African American proprietors of the Camp Street store. Within a year, both men had moved on to new ventures (one as a machinist, the other as a painter), and Martha Miller took over the store’s operation. Miller lived a few doors away from the store, so most of the sparse material culture dating to her 1911–1928 residency is associated with the store itself. The yard deposits associated with Miller’s tenure had a concentration of marbles and toys. In the early-20th century, near westside neighborhoods were rapidly subdivided to accommodate the rush of African American migrants. Since many near westside homes had very small backyards and were built nearly up to the street, most yards had very little open space even before subdivision began. The Camp Street grocery had a large yard opening onto the street, and it sat on a heavily trafficked neighborhood corner within sight of the city’s prominent African American businesses along Indiana Avenue. Like the many black barbershops and salons in the near westside, corner stores served as both commercial and social spaces. In some corner stores the literal corner itself and the store’s outside spaces were critical to the marketers’ social and financial viability. Such spaces were critical for a black community that was marginalized in or denied access to most of the city’s implicitly white consumer and public spaces. The dense deposits of marbles, toys, and coins suggest that the Camp Street store lot may have been a gathering place for neighborhood residents, including children. Many antebellum African Americans had been ambitious entrepreneurs, but the number of Afri- can American marketers expanded exponentially in turn-of-the-century Indianapolis. This develop- ment reflected widespread African American dis- appointment with partisan politics. Reconstruc- tion promises had passed largely unfulfilled, and politicians had willingly undercut African Ameri- can voting rights, civil privileges, and the most basic human rights. Stung by this racist politi- cal system and an increasingly hostile white society, many African Americans turned their energy toward building a relatively independent black economy and investing considerable hope in an emergent consumer culture. That hope in Progressive-era consumer society was certainly not limited to African Americans. Between the late-19th century and about 1920, a panoply of observers agreed that material consumption had sociopolitical import (Cohen 2001:204). Most of this national commentary focused on how consumption could impact community morals, labor conditions, and standards of living. Out- side African America, few observers examined consumption’s relationship to the color line, but many African American communities quickly championed consumer activism, such as patron- age of African American merchants and boycotts against racist marketers. Cooperative movements received significant exposure in the African American press, but few were viable enterprises. African Americans developed quite successful marketing districts in many cities, with diversi- fied African American business communities in Midwestern cities like Indianapolis and Chicago. As in Chicago, race-insular businesses without white competitors were the near westside’s most successful and long-term ventures (Cohen 1990: 149). Black barbers, hairdressers, and undertak- ers, for instance, had no competition from white entrepreneurs, and many such African American ventures were quite prosperous and long-lived. The Willis Funeral Home, for instance, was established in 1890, and today sits alongside the Walker Theatre, where it remains in business. Nevertheless, even prosperous African American entrepreneurs could not expect complete material and social separation from the dominant white consumer economy, and even in the most pros- perous black business districts, African Ameri- cans were still compelled to buy some goods from merchants who were European or white. Ultimately, the notion of a black economy was a somewhat conservative structural cri- tique, despite its profound critique of consumer culture’s anti-black dimensions. For the most part, a “black economy” simply transported the basic structure of a capitalist marketplace and attempted to purge it of antiblack racism. The most significant challenge to African American corner merchants came from chain stores, which first appeared in Indianapolis in the early-20th century and were most successful in the grocery business. Chains, however, were slow to move into marginalized neighborhoods. Most of the first chains in Indianapolis were located in genteel, white neighborhoods and downtown, not in the near westside. Indiana Avenue would always remain dominated by 94 HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 42(1) 95PAUL R. MULLINS—Marketing in a Multicultural Neighborhood single-store, African American marketers. Nev- ertheless, by the mid-1930s, chains accounted for 24% of sales in Indiana (U.S. Dept. of Commerce 1937:73). In 1940, 996 grocery stores were located in Indianapolis, including 25 chains that included at least two stores. Only one of the near westside’s 37 groceries in 1940 was part of a chain, but nearby chain stores certainly were frequented by neighborhood resi- dents; chain prices typically ran about 15% less than corner groceries (Longstreth 1997:72). One of the attractions of corner stores had been a willingness to run an “open account” for neigh- bors, but 79% of grocery sales in Indiana were cash and carry by 1935. Some of the chains had a reputation for settling in black neighborhoods but not hiring African Americans. In the 1930s an African American coalition championed a “Don’t buy where you can’t work” campaign that chose local chains Kroger and Standard as their primary targets (Thornbrough 2000:76–77). The chains did apparently hire a few African American employees when African Americans threatened to shop elsewhere. Postwar demographic shifts were critical fac- tors in the decline of corner stores in India- napolis. During the Depression the near westside became dominated by increasingly dense rental housing and deteriorating conditions. After World War II, many veterans led an exodus to newly built neighborhoods to the north, and this shift continued unabated into the 1960s. Clyde Bolden (1983:36) found that between 1930 and 1950 music clubs dominated Indiana Avenue, with its earlier business diversity decreasing significantly and forcing local consumers to travel to other areas in the city. Bolden’s (1983: 39) count of Indiana Avenue businesses found that restaurants always were the most common venture along the avenue, followed closely by groceries and hairstylists. In 1916, 11.98% of the avenue’s 217 businesses were groceries, and in 1930 that percentage was a comparable 11.27% (23 of 204). When the avenue’s gro- ceries and neighborhood corner stores are con- sidered together, it is clear that groceries were the near westside’s most common business into the 1940s, especially in the neighborhoods off Indiana Avenue. In 1950 the number of businesses on Indiana Avenue had shrunk to 182, of which only 12 (6.59%) were groceries, and the corner store markets in surrounding neighborhoods felt the impact of these same shifts as residents and businesses moved out of the community. By the 1950s, the disintegration of near westside neigh- borhoods was reflected in the Camp Street store, which was being managed by Jesse Robinson. Robinson was selling coal and ice as well as standard corner store goods. In about 1956, he filled a cistern with an assemblage that attests to the store’s decline. After heaving a toilet into the six-foot deep feature, the storekeeper threw in at least 137 bottles, reflecting that the store was primarily selling alcohol by that time—46 vessels had held liquor, another 17 were wine bottles, and at least 3 were beer bottles, which collectively accounts for nearly half the assem- blage. The next most common vessel type was soda bottles: 32 bottles of Nehi, Fanta, Sun Crest, and similar Cold War Midwestern sodas dominate the assemblage. Edwards (1932:58) indicated in 1932 that black corner marketers sold large volumes of canned goods, and the density of tin cans in the Camp Street cistern indicates that the store was selling a consider- able volume of canned foods, alongside this narrow range of bottled goods and ice. There is no evidence in the cistern for many other goods. This modest range of goods was likely what many other corner stores sold as the neighbor- hood disintegrated (Mullins 1999:178–179). The social network surrounding black con- sumer spaces in the near westside significantly influenced community identities, but it was not isolated from other institutional influences. For example, Hoosiers have long placed church life at the center of social and individual identity, and black churches often lent entrepreneurship and materialism a dimension of faith. In 1930, for instance, James Weldon Johnson (1930:153– 154) noted that when property was inexpensive in early-20th-century Harlem, “buying property became a contagious fever. It became a part of the gospel preached in churches.” African American entrepreneurs often projected faith onto secular marketing interests and made little distinction between religion and economics, but the city’s churches were divided along complex class and social lines that did not champion any particularly coherent economic vision. The near westside’s 10 churches in 1915 ranged from small storefront churches to several large congregations. These churches certainly had a 94 HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 42(1) 95PAUL R. MULLINS—Marketing in a Multicultural Neighborhood profound impact on how African Americans viewed the politics of marketing and consump- tion, but they were easily outnumbered by the 50 groceries in the same neighborhood. In con- trast to Sunday services, wealthy and poor Afri- can Americans mingled together on the avenue and in stores, providing a significant shared cultural life. Nevertheless, that appearance of African American integration across class lines in consumer space may itself have been forced on African Americans through segregation. One African American who returned from World War II acknowledged that “Indiana Avenue was the area where it happened for us… . But it was eventually to the point where you started going because of segregation mainly” (Ridley 2002). The most prominent single institutional influence in the near westside probably was the segre- gated school system, especially Crispus Attucks High School. Established as the city’s sole black high school in 1927, Attucks was staffed by a host of well-educated African Americans unable to secure work in white schools, and the school championed a fierce commitment to education as the mechanism to combat racism. The importance of the near westside’s modest stores and the social significance of the entre- preneurs running those venues are typically lost. Analyses often focus on prominent social institutions, such as schools and churches, or overlook the significance of small stores as social spaces structuring neighborhood identity. Yet in a mostly segregated urban America, mass culture in general and consumption in particular were prominent mechanisms that bound African Americans together, much as they bound many European immigrants. Placing entrepreneurship at the heart of 20th-century African American culture or elevating marketing and consumption to a prominent role in life across the color line does not mean that African American culture became synonymous with consumer culture. African American consumers still had distinc- tive social and material politics. It seems telling that many civil rights actions were eventually directed at consumer spaces such as restaurants and stores. That makes sense in Indianapolis, where African Americans had a long heritage of entrepreneurship and consumption that afforded them heightened awareness of citizen rights that went along with marketing and shopping. Rather than simply reduce stores and marketers to transparent intermediaries in the production and consumption process, it makes more sense to accord social meaningfulness to shopping and entrepreneurship and to recognize their signifi- cant capacity to shape community identity and negotiate dominant social ideologies. Acknowledgments Excavations at 800 Camp Street were made pos- sible by the Ransom Place Neighborhood Asso- ciation; thanks to all the association members and neighbors who contributed to the project, especially Daisy Borel and Thomas Ridley. Thanks to Jeanette Dickerson-Putman, Rick Ward, Liz Kryder-Reid, Bob Paynter, and Mark Warner for discussing various elements of this project with me. 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MULLINS DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY CAVANAUGH 413B INDIANA UNIVERSITY-PURDUE UNIVERSITY, INDIANAPOLIS INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA 46202