Marching Through The Snow: A Civil Rights Christmas

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Adé Hennis
December 16, 2024

The holiday season wasn’t just for spending quality time with family, but also for  hitting the streets and making racist businesses feel the pain where it would hurt the most : - their pockets.

#1: The 1961 Christmas Shopping Boycott: Mississippi NAACP President Aaron Henry, a pharmacist, prescribed white owners of Clarksdale stores a heavy dose of reality with a shopping boycott over their refusal to hire Black people outside of low-wage jobs. Protest leaders were arrested for “conspiring to withhold trade” but successfully appealed, continuing the protest and devastating white-owned businesses.

#2: The 1963 Christmas Sacrifice: It wasn’t a silent night, but most Black families in Greenville, North Carolina, staged a silent protest with a Blackout, refusing to turn on Christmas lights. Paired with a shopping boycott targeting discriminatory white businesses, their efforts led to the city’s most significant increase in Black employment during the 1964 holiday season.

#3: The 1968 Black Christmas: Black residents of Durham, North Carolina, left town to shop at Black-owned stores, arranged pop-up markets in church basements, and blacklisted all the naughty businesses that wouldn’t hire Black people. When those businesses' holiday sales plummeted, many agreed to a 15-page list of demands from the Black community.

Our ancestors chose civil rights over capitalistic consumerism to ensure a better future for us. Injustice doesn’t take holiday breaks, and neither does the fight for Black liberation.

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