S. H. Kress

S. H. Kress & Co. was the trading name of a chain of "five and dime" retail department stores in the United States, established by Samuel Henry Kress, which operated from 1896 to 1981. In the first half of the 20th century, there were Kress stores with ornamented architecture on "Main Street" in hundreds of cities and towns.

Kress opened his first "stationery and notions" store in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania in 1887. The chain of S. H. Kress & Co. 5-10-25 Cent Stores was established in 1896. In the 1920s and 1930s, Kress sold a house label of phonograph records under the Romeo trademark. He died in 1955.

The company's exclusion of African Americans from its lunch counters made Kress a target for civil rights protests during the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, along with Woolworth's, Rexall and other national chains. In Nashville, Tennessee, Kress repeatedly refused to serve the protesters but eventually agreed to integrate the downtown store in exchange for ending a consumer boycott. The Greensboro, North Carolina Kress was included in the first civil rights demonstrations in the South. In Adickes v. S.H. Kress Co., the U.S. Supreme Court threw out trespass convictions resulting from a sit-in at a Kress lunch counter in Mississippi. The Kress store in Baton Rouge was the site of that city's first civil rights sit-in. That event helped save it from demolition 45 years later.

In 1964 Genesco, Inc. acquired Kress. The company abandoned its center-city stores and moved to shopping malls. Genesco began liquidating Kress and closing down the Kress stores in 1980. The remaining Kress stores were sold to McCrory Stores on January 1, 1981. Most continued to operate under the Kress name until McCrory Stores went out of business in 2001.

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