McLellan Stores were a 20th-century chain of five and dime

Five and Dime

Five and Dime is a cartoon short by Walter Lantz which features Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. It is the 74th Oswald short produced by Lantz and the 125th overall. It also is among the number of shorts that feature Oswald in his fully clothed appearance....

 stores in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

.

The stores were founded by William Walker McLellan

William Walker McLellan

William Walker McLellan was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He came to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, and began working at a department store in Newark, New Jersey. He became a manager of the first S. H. Kress store in Memphis, Tennessee, and then joined McCrory Stores as a...

 (died April 1960 at age 87) in 1917. The chain grew to 200 variety stores, but the Great Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

 drove the company into bankruptcy

Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....

. The company was able to emerge from bankruptcy without reorganization, but control was obtained by United Stores Corporation which had bought shares on the stock market.

McLellan Stores merged with McCrory Stores

McCrory Stores

J.G. McCrory's or McCrory Stores was a chain of five and dime stores in the United States based in York, Pennsylvania. The stores typically sold shoes, clothing, housewares, fabrics, penny candy, toys, cosmetics, and often included a lunch counter or snack bar...

 in 1958. Many of the stores were converted to McCrory's or J.J. Newberry's (owned by the same company), and have ultimately been closed as McCrory's entered bankruptcy in the 1990s.

Like many similar stores, it had segregated lunch counter

Lunch counter

A lunch counter is a small restaurant, much like a diner, where the patron sits on a stool on one side of the counter and the server or person preparing the food serves from the other side of the counter, where the kitchen or limited food preparation area is. As the name suggests, they were most...

s in its stores in the southern United States until protests (including sit-in

Sit-in

A sit-in or sit-down is a form of protest that involves occupying seats or sitting down on the floor of an establishment.-Process:In a sit-in, protesters remain until they are evicted, usually by force, or arrested, or until their requests have been met...

s) in the early 1960s forced it to desegregate

Desegregation

Desegregation is the process of ending the separation of two groups usually referring to races. This is most commonly used in reference to the United States. Desegregation was long a focus of the American Civil Rights Movement, both before and after the United States Supreme Court's decision in...

.