A fight for holiday equality: How Black Santas shaped US civil rights

But, as Moss would learn, the figure of Santa Claus was more than a pathway to visibility and acceptance. The holiday legend wielded vast economic power.

By 1960, Moss had completed his master’s in divinity at Morehouse and was studying theology at a nearby seminary in Atlanta. But in his spare time, he was deeply enmeshed in the student-led protest movement brewing across the city.

The experience gave him a firsthand view of how Christmas could be a season of protest.

“We ended up organising protests and picketing during the Christmas season,” Moss recalls, as students pushed to desegregate lunch counters and stores.

The movement aimed to make a dent in the businesses’ pocketbook: One of the rallying cries was to “bankrupt the economy of segregation”.

By the end of the year, sales in downtown Atlanta had fallen by approximately 13 percent compared with the year prior. The Christmas boycotts were credited with costing $10m in sales.

The student protesters, meanwhile, launched their own efforts to generate Christmas profits. They sold “Freedom Christmas cards”, netting more than $4,000 in sales — or nearly $43,000 in today’s money.

Moss saw his participation in the Christmastime movement as part of an “inheritance” of non-violent protest.

After all, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 had begun during the year-end holiday season. And later, in 1963, after white supremacists planted a bomb that killed four young girls, civil rights leaders called for a “Black Christmas” protest, with shoppers abstaining from holiday spending as a show of mourning.

Moss himself remembers being on the picket line, carrying a sign that read “Jim Crow Must Go”, when he was recruited to lead a church in Cincinnati, Ohio, hundreds of kilometres to the north of Atlanta.

As a newly married young man, with the first of three children on the way, Moss decided to leap at the opportunity.

He knew little of the city before arriving. He had only ever passed through Cincinnati by train. It sat on the border of the northern and southern regions of the US.

“If you were headed North, it was Cincinnati where the trains desegregated,” Moss says. “And if you were headed South, Cincinnati was where the trains segregated.”

But north of that invisible boundary, Moss found segregation and racism were just as entrenched as in the south. He started picketing in Cincinnati almost as soon as he settled in.

“I had just left the deep south where segregation or racism was on the throne,” he says. “And when I got to Cincinnati, I discovered quickly that segregation or Jim Crow was behind the throne.”

One of his first efforts was against the Coca-Cola Company, one of the largest soft drink companies in the world. Moss observed they had no Black truck drivers to deliver their product.

So he and his civil rights colleagues leapt into action. Their rallying cry became: “It’s no joke. We’re not drinking Coke.”

No job was too big or too small to be the subject of protest. Moss and his fellow reverends and activists were determined to see equal access to employment, no matter the position.

In 1969, with the holiday shopping season fast approaching, they set their sights on Cincinnati’s downtown shopping scene, with Shillito’s at its centre.

The economic stakes were staggering. Retail sales in December 1969 were worth an estimated $36.2bn — about $311.4bn in today’s currency — according to an article from United Press International. This year, the National Retail Association forecasts holiday spending between November and December will rise to $989bn.

For Moss, accessing that period of bustling economic activity was critical to equality, and Santa Claus was a symbol of that commerce.

“Santa Claus, really, is selling toys,” Moss explains. “It is, by and large, a commercial symbol to appeal to children, which is an indirect appeal to adults to spend money to buy toys and make some people richer, while making some people, in some instances, poorer.”

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