
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.