If "every penny you spend is a vote for the ideal society you want," it's no wonder Black people and other marginalized groups are selective about where they spend their money. For them, boycotting is the language of the unheard, a way of communicating with those in positions of power who would otherwise overlook their concerns. Consider, for instance, the historical narrative of Jackie Robinson. Before crossing the color line to become the first Black man to play for a Major League Baseball team, Jackie played shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro American League team. While traveling on a barnstorming tour in 1945, their bus stopped at a gas station in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Jackie stepped off the bus with his teammates and began walking toward the restroom, but a white service station attendant stopped him, saying he couldn't go in. When asked why, the attendant replied, "We don't allow any colored people in that restroom." Jackie said, "Ok, then, take the hose out of the tank." Since the team planned to buy enough gas to fill their two 50-gallon tanks, the station owner would have taken a substantial loss, so he backed down.

Black Americans often organized boycotts of businesses to express discontent with their policies and practices, imposing economic consequences for discrimination. Not all were successful, but they represented the struggle for progress. In 1905, Tennessee passed a law that required "operators of streetcars to designate by means of 'conspicuous signs' which part of the car was for white and black passengers." Along with other black codes that tightly restricted the lives of Black people, this legislation represented a barrier to equality. Unsatisfied with second-class citizenship, many in the black community of Nashville, Tennessee, responded by organizing and participating in a boycott. One of the leaders, Rev. J.A. Jones, a Black man who served as a pastor at the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, warned that the bus company would "lose nine-tenths of its negro” customers if it racially segregated its cars. The Nashville Clarion urged Black people to "buy buggies" and, if they couldn't, to "wear solid shoes and walk." Unfortunately, this boycott failed to bring about the change many were hoping for.

In Nashville, the black community faced a unique set of challenges. While "streetcar companies didn't actually want segregation" because "it would cost money to maintain," according to historian Tom Wood, the law required them to seat Black and White riders separately. Many argue that Black people should create their own businesses in response to the prejudicial treatment they face. But that objective is easier said than done. In this case, when leaders of the black community created their own streetcar company, the Union Transportation Co., owned and operated by Black people, its cars didn't have enough horsepower to climb Broadway Hill, making the service unreliable for getting people where they needed to go on time. When the company switched to electric cars, "white streetcar companies sabotaged their batteries and the city taxed them heavily"; the combined effect contributed to their failure. Although their boycott failed, their efforts, along with others, such as the 1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott, served as a blueprint for the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott from 1955 to 1956.

Since Black people living in the South were politically disenfranchised during Jim Crow, they could not easily change the laws and policies that governed society. And some had no choice in where they shopped for the goods they needed. Many White planters paid Black sharecroppers in scrip, a form of currency usable only at the plantation store, where prices were much higher than those in marketplaces available to White people and others, trapping many in a cycle of poverty. Given that only some Black families owned a vehicle before World War II, they were more dependent on nearby goods and services. And when a greater proportion of Black people purchased cars, trucks, and vans, they had to exercise caution while traveling because of sundown towns that prohibited Black people from being in public spaces after sunset, as well as discriminatory policies that rejected their patronage. In 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a post office worker from Harlem, published the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide to help Black travelers navigate this discriminatory landscape. Whenever possible, Black people used their collective economic power to boycott companies with discriminatory policies.

For instance, during the Great Depression, when "African American unemployment rates doubled or tripled those of whites," the problem of economic inequality came to a head. According to historian Cheryl Lynn Greenberg (1991), this economic downturn hampered "employment prospects for African Americans, and white merchants ossified their refusal to hire blacks for white-collar positions." In response, Joseph Bibb, the editor of The Chicago Whip, a Black-owned newspaper, launched a movement in 1929, with the slogan "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work." Sufi Abudl Hamid, a local leader and activist, founded the Negro Industrial, Clerical, and Benevolent League and launched a campaign to persuade white store owners to hire qualified Black workers. Reverend John H. Johnson, the co-founder of Citizens League for Fair Play, also organized boycotts against businesses that discriminated against Black people. One of the group's flyers noted that there was a "large proportion of Negro business" at Blumstein's, yet the store "refused to employ Negro Clerks," encouraging Black consumers to boycott. The Harlem Housewives League, a group with 1,000 members by 1931, requested that store managers hire Black people "as clerks, messengers, etc., in proportion to the amount of money spent in those stores by Negroes."

While many Black people in Harlem supported the broader goal of using their collective economic power to boycott stores that benefited from Black consumers while maintaining discriminatory policies, these groups differed in their approach. Sufi Abdul Hamid's group sought employment for experienced Black clerks and drew criticism from those who believed their objectives excluded those without retail experience. The Harlem Housewives League, led by Ella Baker and Effa Manley, advocated that stores such as Woolworth's and S.H. Kress hire Black people in proportion to their patronage, regardless of job type or pay level, a get-your-foot-in-the-door approach. These Black women believed this effort was as far as they could push the envelope at the time. Yet John H. Johnson's movement, along with the New York Urban League, the NAACP, and others, fought specifically for Black people to access high-quality, non-menial roles. Historian Cheryl Lynn Greenberg noted that "It took almost a decade for Harlem activists to organize a campaign to win such jobs," showing that with persistent effort, change is possible.

Some tactics used in the Northeast and West in the 1930s were adopted in the South, particularly throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Traci Parker, a historian and professor, explained that "African American customers were welcome to shop, but were provided with uneven, unequal service, and found their movements and participation in the usual shopping 'experience' severely constrained." She argued that because department stores served as both places of employment and consumption, they "became optimal sites for black resistance." After World War II, many Black people worked behind the scenes, "meeting with store officials, executing successful lunch counter sit-ins, and engaging in selective patronage in the 1950s and the 1960s, and challenging the reconsolidation of racial discrimination in the courts in the 1970s." An early example was the successful boycott of the Hecht's department store, led by the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of DC Anti-Discrimination Laws (CCEAD), a multiracial organization. One year later, in January 1952, store officials integrated their lunch counters. Parker suggested that, since in the 1970s "consumerism was celebrated as the 'essence' of American freedom," Black activists positioned their fight against racial discrimination and exclusion as aligned with shared economic values.

Lunch counters and sit-ins throughout the South played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement because they "reinforced communal solidarity of black consumers and laborers." In 1960, four Black college students sat at the lunch counter at Woolworth's department store in Greensboro and refused to leave even after White employees denied them service. Their protest led to the desegregation of that location. Less than two weeks later, Reverend James Lawson Jr. helped organize a boycott in Tennessee in which "124 college students conducted sit-ins at the lunch counter of three stores in downtown Nashville." Kress and McLellan, popular department stores, initially closed their lunch counters as "white staff and customers appeared shaken by the students' protest." But they persisted. In an educational article, Citlalli Chávez-Nava and Vanessa Codilla explained that "white mobs threw food at the protestors, poured drinks down their shirts, put out cigarettes in their hair, yelled obscenities and racial slurs, and beat them. Police did not restrain or arrest the attackers. Instead, the officers approached the students and told them that if they did not vacate the stools, they would be arrested." Throughout this ordeal, police arrested eighty students.

Throughout American history, and well into the modern era, boycotting has served as the language of the unheard. This is especially true for Black people and other marginalized groups, who are denied equal access to leadership positions. We hear echoes of this movement in the NAACP's issuance of a Black Consumer Advisory in February 2025, following Target's axing of its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. For many in the Black community, refusing to shop there was a concrete way to hold the company accountable. In another case, after a jury found Rick Chow, a Chinese convenience store owner, not guilty of murder in the fatal shooting of Cyrus Carmack-Belton, a 14-year-old Black teenager accused of trying to steal water bottles, his mother, Nicole Carmack, suggested that Black people should boycott. "If we go into a store and they're following us around, do not spend your dollar." While some assumed she was pushing for a generalized boycott of Asian businesses, her statement implies a more narrow approach, aligned with precedent — that Black people should refuse to spend money at stores that racially profile them, and their loved ones. Some drew comparisons to the 1991 killing of Latasha Harlins, a Black teenager, also fourteen at the time of her death, who was fatally shot by Soon Ja Du, a Los Angeles shop owner, after being accused of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. They were also found not guilty. When Black people boycott businesses that racially profile Black consumers and employees, they're using their collective economic power to advocate for positive social change. While economic racial solidarity may be seen as controversial, this method has a proven track record.