As the postwar African American freedom struggle gathered pace, Black Santas provided civil rights campaigners with a novel tool to help draw greater public visibility to their cause. In Bloomington, Ind., the local chapter of the NAACP entered a Black Santa float into the city’s annual Christmas parade to raise awareness of discrimination within the city’s Chamber of Commerce. In Milwaukee, a Black Santa led a march for open housing legislation. In New York, protests about Santa Claus segregation led major department stores such as Macy’s and Abraham & Straus to hire Black Santas. From New Jersey to San Francisco, Black Santas protested against pervasive forms of racial bias.
At the same time, militant Black activists rallied against the specter of the White Santa Claus. For some Black power advocates, the figure became just another example of White cultural hegemony and the psychological harm inflicted upon Black people, and in particular Black children, in a society shaped by White social attitudes and expectations. Accordingly, the fight for Black liberation demanded the rejection of Santa Claus, and indeed, of Christmas, altogether.
During the aftermath of the Watts riots in Los Angeles, cultural nationalist Ron Karenga created Kwanzaa as an opportunity for Black people “to celebrate themselves and their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.” By the early 1970s, Black power groups such as the EAST organization had taken this message to heart, imploring Black communities to “Kill Santa Claus, relive Kwanza[a], bring forth the cultural revolution.” Similarly, the Black Panther Party warned followers that Santa Claus embodied a racist holiday used by “pig thieves” (avaricious White business executives) to exploit oppressed people. To emphasize this point, graphic artist Emory Douglas created images for the Black Panther community newspaper depicting gun-toting Black revolutionaries waiting to jump a pig Santa Claus as he emerged from the chimney.
Where Black activists didn’t reject the image of Santa Claus wholesale, they dramatically remade it to embody the radical currents of the age. Perhaps nowhere was this clearer than through a series of Black Christmas parades in Chicago, organized by Operation Breadbasket, the economic arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
The inaugural 1968 parade featured dozens of floats paid for by local Black businesses and political organizations and featuring slogans such as “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud this Christmas.” The parade was guided by a Black Santa resplendent in a Black velvet dashiki and wearing a black glove in support of African American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, whose protest at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico less than two months earlier had garnered international attention.