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

The meeting lasted only an hour. But Reverend Otis Moss Jr emerged with the distinct feeling he had been disrespected.

Only three weeks remained until the Christmas holiday, and Moss had arrived at the Shillito’s department store in downtown Cincinnati with a purpose.

Rising seven floors from the corner of West Seventh and Elm, Shillito’s was the commercial heart of the Ohio city. And Christmas time was its peak season.

Year after year, pedestrians gathered under the sweeping limestone edifice to marvel at its window displays, brimming with twinkling lights and festive tableaus: animated “snow people” skating across a frozen pond, or tiny animals and elves acting out holiday scenes.

The excitement was so great that, for two years in a row, newspapers reported that the “crush of onlookers” created a “human traffic jam” on the pavement.

But amid the bustle and merrymaking, Moss and his colleagues saw a lack. It was early December 1969, and leaders in the United States civil rights movement were continuing to push for equal opportunity for Americans of all races.

At 34 years old, tall and slender with a firm gaze, Moss was the head of the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of the most prominent civil rights organisations of the age. He had worked side by side with the group’s very first president, Martin Luther King Jr.

On that frosty day in December, he had hoped to convince the head of Shillito’s and other department stores to hire Black workers across all areas of its business. It was part of a series of steps Moss and his colleagues had proposed to make the workplace more equitable.

But one job opening proved especially contentious: Would Shillito’s be willing to hire a Black man to play Santa Claus, as part of its yearly holiday meet-and-greets?

“We had that meeting, and literally we had 12 demands,” Moss, now 89, remembers. “The one that got the most attention was the Black Santa Claus.”

Santa Claus. Sinterklaas. Saint Nicholas. Over the centuries, the Christmastime legend has worn many hats: the pointy mitre of a fourth-century bishop, a crown wreathed in spiked holly leaves, a red hood rimmed with white fur.

But in the United States, what race Santa is presented as remains a controversial topic.

On conservative media outlets, the topic is a regular feature of the holiday season. In 2013, then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly hosted an entire panel on the subject, opening the conversation with a message: “By the way, for all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white.”

Ten years later, in 2023, the news channel was once again dissecting the subject.

“It doesn’t make sense. You have to ask yourself: Why do they keep pushing this? Who are they trying to appeal to?” Riley Gaines, a Fox guest host, said as a figurine of a Black Santa Claus in a wheelchair flashed across the screen.

It was the same perspective that Moss had encountered more than half a century prior.

He and five of his colleagues from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had requested a meeting with Shillito’s top brass — and they got it.

Fred Lazarus III, the chairman of Shillito’s board and head of the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, had agreed to sit down with them, along with the leader of another major retailer.

Moss remembers Lazarus as an ordinary man. Nothing remarkable. But in his hands was the power to reshape US commerce.

A greying man in his late 50s, with thick eyebrows and a thinning hairline, Lazarus was the scion of one of the most prominent retail empires in the country.

His was the family behind the Federated Department Stores, a conglomerate that included some of the biggest department stores in the country: Filene’s in Boston, Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn, Bloomingdale’s in New York.

His ancestors had been in the retail business since 1851. Their stores were among the first to pioneer modern conveniences like escalators, air conditioning and fixed prices. Lazarus’s father even successfully petitioned President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939 to move the Thanksgiving holiday to a whole week earlier, to extend the Christmas shopping season.

Lazarus, a World War II veteran and graduate of Yale University, eventually joined the family business. Newspapers glowingly praised him as “a driving force behind the rebirth of downtown Cincinnati”.

But faced with Moss and his demands, the retail leader baulked. “He was not the epitome of courtesy,” Moss recalls. Lazarus appeared particularly appalled at the prospect of hiring a Black Santa Claus for the holiday season.

“This has nothing to do with equality of employment or anything else,” Lazarus explained the next day in the local newspaper, echoing what he had told Moss. “We felt that a Black face would be incongruous with the traditional Santa image.”

Moss still remembers how the civil rights leaders replied during the meeting. “Our response was: Then maybe it is incongruous that you would have Black customers.”

One of Moss’s colleagues even threatened a selective buying campaign, a kind of boycott popular during the civil rights era. According to Moss, Lazarus brushed aside the prospect. “I’m not going to lose any sleep over it,” he shrugged.

Lazarus’s chilly dismissal ignited Moss’s resolve. “We left that meeting with an insult, but with heightened determination that protest was not only needed but absolutely necessary,” Moss recalls.

But in the following day’s edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer, Lazarus mounted a vehement defence. He estimated that 95 percent of his customers would be “dissatisfied” with a Black Santa Claus in Shillito’s annual Christmastime display.

“It just doesn’t fit the symbol as kids have known it,” Lazarus argued.

For Moss and others, however, Black Santa Clauses were no novelty. They were a tradition stretching back to their own childhoods and beyond.

Growing up in the countryside on the outskirts of LaGrange, Georgia, Moss attended a one-room public schoolhouse.

When it burned down, the county did not bother to rebuild it, Moss says. It was a time of segregation in the southern United States, and a poorly funded, poorly supplied school for Black children was considered no great loss.

So Moss and his four siblings got their education instead at the nearby Baptist church, Old Mount Olive.

The five of them had grown accustomed to loss. When Moss was only four, his mother passed away. A former schoolteacher, she was only 36 years old. Moss, his three older sisters and seven-month-old baby brother were left in the care of their father, a farmer. He never remarried.

“Every day I live, I have to have great admiration for my father, who took on the responsibility of a single parent of five minor children,” Moss says.

Family, church and school were the three axes Moss’s life revolved around during his childhood in the 1930s and ’40s. He set his sights on “advancing in life and going to college”.

But all around him, there was “strict segregation everywhere”. Signs labelled “coloured only” or “white only” demarcated the boundaries of who was allowed where.

“This is in all public places and public transportation, in courtrooms, schoolhouses, everywhere,” Moss recalls.

Even Christmas celebrations in LaGrange were divided along racial lines.

“In my community, there were two images of Santa Claus,” Moss explains. “In our community, in church or in school, the person who played the role of Santa Claus was Black. But in the wider community, in the stores and in other presentations, Santa Claus was white.”

That division nagged at the young Moss, spurring him to mull “unasked questions”. What, for example, did it mean to have a Black Santa in one place, and a white one in another?

But Christmas was also a time of imagination and creativity in Moss’s community. At school and church, songs were sung, speeches given and poetry recited. And then, of course, there was the food. Neighbours shared home-baked cookies, cakes and southern-style pies.

“It was a village of remarkable spiritual support,” Moss recalls. “In the midst of an apartheid-type, Jim Crow situation, because of the creativity of parents and elders and teachers, we found a way to grow, support each other and dream.”

The day Moss left home, he was 17. The church had given him purpose: He had decided to study divinity. He gave his first sermon on the day he left LaGrange for Morehouse College, in the state capital of Atlanta.

“It was September — the first or second Sunday in September 1952,” Moss recalls. “And the sermon was ‘To whom can I be a neighbour?’, taken from the parable of the Good Samaritan.”

At Morehouse, Moss found himself steeped in the civil rights movement. “It was a daily part of my education,” he explains.

He had grown up hearing stories of enslavement and the struggle to be free. Now, he would be a part of it.

Even before Moss was born, the holiday season had been a civil rights battleground — and Santa Claus played a prominent role.

He was there in 1863, midway through the US Civil War, sitting high atop a sleigh stacked with gifts for Union soldiers. One young drummer boy marvels at a wind-up jack-in-the-box toy. An older soldier, stocky and bearded, lifts a stocking filled with treats.

Santa Claus himself dangles a lanky wooden puppet from a string — a figure meant to mock the leader of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, a vocal defender of slavery in the southern states.

That image, which appeared on the cover of the national publication Harper’s Weekly, is considered one of the defining moments in the creation of the modern-day Santa Claus.

No longer was Saint Nick a stern, wizened figure. Cartoonist Thomas Nast had reimagined him as a jolly, elven man with a pointy hat and a paunchy belly.

The year the cartoon was published marked a turning point in the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in US history.

That year started with the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order from Washington, DC, declaring all enslaved people in the Confederacy to be free. It ended with key victories like the Battle of Gettysburg, which stopped the Confederacy’s advance northward, leaving it on the defensive.

Thomas Nast’s patriotic Santa Claus, however, was not the final word in the evolution of the holiday legend.

In Nast’s hands, Santa Claus was a symbol for the Union cause, clad in the stars and stripes of the US flag. In other hands, however, Santa was a propaganda tool of a different sort, helping to reinforce racial stereotypes.

Minstrel shows in the late 19th century married the figure with Blackface makeup to create imitation Santa Clauses who served as counterpoints to the benevolent white ones.

These Blackface Santas were subjects of ridicule. They were bumbling thieves and klutzes who tumbled down chimneys, landing in the roaring flames below. But most of all, they were symbols of an ongoing system of oppression that excluded Black people from inhabiting the Yuletide ideals of goodness, prosperity and hope.

But Black communities were also formulating their own version of Santa Claus, separate from the stereotypes designed to demean them.

By the 20th century, Black Santa Clauses had started to appear, offering a different narrative for the holiday season: one hinged on representation and empowerment.

In 1917, for instance, the Black Dispatch newspaper in Oklahoma published a cartoon on its front page showing an African American Santa scaling a wooden fence, each panel tagged with an obstacle to equality: segregation, mob violence, race hate and ill-paid labour.

Over the Santa’s shoulder was slung a bag filled with packages labelled “love”, “education” and “justice”.

“It’s a high fence but I’ll get these things to ‘em,” the Santa Claus in the cartoon says.

For 100-year-old civil rights leader Henry Gay Sr, working with a Black Santa Claus back in 1966 proved to be transformative.

Born to a family of sharecroppers — Black tenant farmers — in Shreveport, Louisiana, Gay knew what it was like to have members of the Ku Klux Klan, the notorious white supremacist group, chasing him with guns.

He credits his Christian faith with his survival. “They was killing Black people left and right back then,” he recalls in a warm southern drawl.

After working for years as a cotton picker in Arkansas, Gay moved north, following a woman he had fallen in love with. He settled in her family’s hometown: Bloomington, Illinois.

But his arrival in 1954 came with disappointment: Racism was just as prevalent in the north as it had been in the south.

“I had been hearing the whole time [that] when you crossed St Louis — that was the Mason Dixon line — things would be different,” Gay says. “But it was just as bad here than it was down in the southern part.”

He took jobs cleaning buildings, restaurants and cars at the local dealerships. The work netted him a meagre 50 cents a day, he says.

His frustration led him to join the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the country’s largest and oldest civil rights organisations.

“You could see things wasn’t normal,” Gay says. A deeply religious man, he could not fathom the hate he was experiencing.

“God loves everybody. He treats us all the same,” he explains. “And it was hard to understand why the white people would be so hard on the coloured people: hate them, take them out and hang them, and beat them up.”

Gay found a kindred spirit in the late Merlin Kennedy, who became the president of the Bloomington NAACP in the 1960s. Together, they fought for fair housing and employment opportunities.

Merlin’s daughter, Lana Therese Kennedy White, would often join them at protests, waving picket signs and singing the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome. A self-described tomboy, she remembers admiring her father’s bravery.

At home, Merlin could be playful, leading the local Boy Scout troop and chaperoning teen sock hops. But when he was helming the picket line, he morphed into a no-nonsense leader, determined to instigate change.

“My dad was really, I would say, hell-bent on having the world be fair,” Lana Therese says. “He felt things should be done right. He wanted fairness.”

But the holiday season would bring Merlin and Gay their biggest platform yet.

On the day of Bloomington’s annual Christmas parade, Merlin dressed for an act of defiance.

He pulled on a pair of shiny black boots, slipped his arms through a fire-engine red coat and strapped on a tufted white beard that was so long, it draped halfway almost to his waist.

He was Santa Claus. A Black Santa Claus.

This was not Merlin’s first outing as the jolly Saint Nick. A year earlier, in 1965, his appearance had caused such a stir that the city of Bloomington implemented a new rule mandating that only one Santa should be allowed in the parade.

In other words, Merlin’s Santa Claus was not welcome.

But times were changing. Celebrities like the dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and the baseball legend Jackie Robinson had both incarnated the holiday legend by that time.

And the department store Blumstein’s in Harlem, New York, had hired a Black Santa Claus to greet guests since 1943. It even had a mechanical holiday decoration reflecting the same style of Santa. If it could happen in New York, why not in Bloomington?

On the morning of the Christmas parade, Gay, Merlin and their colleagues were prepared to march, regardless of city hall’s “one Santa” rule.

They hid their float — a flatbed topped with a sleigh and a cut-out reindeer — among the leafless trees at Franklin Park, the branches bare from the cold. Gay was tasked with crowd control. Merlin’s Santa was assigned to ride on top.

But as the float prepared to leave the park and enter the intersection at Main and Chestnut, a pair of police officers showed up. “They always went in twos,” Gay recalls. The officers had come to block the float from joining the parade.

Gay still gets upset thinking about that moment. The officers would not budge. Gay feared he and his friends would be arrested — or worse.

“See, they didn’t want the Black people to do nothing. That’s the thing. We wasn’t supposed to be nothing,” he says. “Sometimes I think about it and I cry. Why was I treated that way?”

“We’ve still got people out there that think Black people shouldn’t be represented by nothing,” Gay adds.

The team made a quick decision. It was time to abandon the float. “We didn’t have no other choice. It was either ditch it or get beat up or go to jail,” Gay explains.

Instead, they would march the parade route on foot. “They couldn’t stop you from walking,” Gay says with an audible shrug.

But even from the pavement, Merlin’s Santa Claus generated a buzz. Gay was prepared for hecklers. None came. Mostly, people were surprised. For about two miles, Gay estimates Merlin travelled down the street, greeting parade-goers.

He ultimately ended his march at the Bloomington courthouse, where he circled the square with a line of supporters on his heels.

That day marked a shift in Gay’s mind. He remembers strangers coming up to talk to him. Everyone smiled. Even the air seemed to smell better.

“Before that, there was just so much hate, you could cut it with a knife when you’re walking,” he says. “Everybody had a change of heart after that. You could feel the tension just going away.”

He considers that day a milestone. The presence of a Black Santa Claus was disarming. It opened people’s minds.

“Just put yourself in that position. You’ve been telling your kid, all the years, there wasn’t such a thing as a Black Santa Claus. And then the kid sees Black Santa Claus, standing close there, out of his own eyes,” Gay says.

“That was the biggest turnaround in race relations that ever happened in Bloomington.”

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.”

But that goal put him at odds with Lazarus, the head of Shillito’s. Moss wanted to see a Black person be hired as Santa Claus. Lazarus seemed dead-set against it. Their meeting ended in a clash of wills.

Moss decided it was time to bring the issue to the community. He called on Black shoppers to turn away from Shillito’s and stores that showed similar resistance to hiring Black Santa Clauses.

“Tell your children that Santa Claus is a symbol,” Moss remembers saying. “And if that symbol cannot be inclusive, covering all races, then that symbol needs to go.”

The campaign brought together some of the biggest names in civil rights at the time. Fred Shuttlesworth commuted back and forth from Birmingham to Cincinnati. A young Jesse Jackson travelled down from Chicago.

It was one of the coldest Decembers Moss remembers spending in Cincinnati. Even during the daytime, temperatures hovered barely above freezing. And the reaction to his protest could be equally frigid.

Moss admits he received “a lot of pushback” to the idea of boycotting during the holiday season.

“There was some trepidation,” he explains. “Christmas is a very joyous time for some. It’s a very emotional moment to say that we must make sacrifices in doing this.”

As they prepared to picket in front of Shillito’s and its famous holiday displays, Moss and his fellow protesters also had to steel themselves for harassment from police and passersby. They limited their ranks to just more than a dozen people or so.

“We intentionally kept to what we might call a manageable unit,” Moss explained. “Enough people that we could call into action and, if need be, quickly call off the battlefield, so to speak.”

On the chilly pavement in front of Shillito’s, they passed out flyers, denouncing the store’s stance.

“To refuse a black Santa purely on tradition, color and race is a major moral blunder and a collective insult to all people of color and conscience,” the sheets explained.

Some of the picket signs were even more barbed. “Welcome to the Lazarus plantation,” one read.

Public pressure mounted. On December 9, Lazarus was quoted in the Cincinnati Post as offering space for a Black Santa to “sit apart” from the white one. Moss refused the proposal as “demeaning”.

On December 14, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran Lazarus’s next move prominently on the front page. He and three other merchants offered a compromise. What if Cincinnati’s mayor appointed a committee of citizens to study “the black Santa issue”?

The mere suggestion was an “evasion of responsibility”, Moss responded to the newspaper a few days later.

“Our position was that we were beyond the point of discussing the issue, that it was time to act,” Moss says, looking back. “We didn’t need a friendly discussion. We needed action.”

Finally, the message Moss had been waiting for arrived. “As I recall, a representative from the department store came to us,” he says. “We started meeting from that point forward.”

Lazarus himself started to backtrack on his position, issuing a public apology during the picketing.

“I deeply regret that a controversy has developed as it has over the issue of a black Santa Claus,” Lazarus, who died in 1996, told local media. “It is now clear that a significant number of people do not consider a black Santa Claus to be incongruous.”

There would be a Black Santa Claus at Shillito’s the very next year. And at Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn. And at Macy’s in New York. The repercussions of Moss’s protests rippled beyond Cincinnati, earning national headlines.

Decades later, Merlin Kennedy’s Santa costume would hang in the local history museum in Bloomington, Illinois, a symbol of a time of great change.

But still, his daughter Lana Therese was facing the same question Merlin had once confronted: Where were all the Black Santa Clauses?

As recently as 2021, the National Santa group estimated that fewer than 25 percent of Santa Claus performers were non-white, Hispanic or multiracial. Fewer than 1 percent were Black.

Inspired by her father, Lana Therese had grown up to be a professional mediator, dealing largely with employment discrimination cases in southern California. She had also become a parent and a grandparent. Her youngest grandchild is now 21.

Every holiday season, she would scour the nearby malls for a Black Santa Claus to entertain the children. She saw it as a tribute to her father and his protest.

“The change has to begin, and sometimes it begins with small things. But if it doesn’t begin somewhere, then it never happens,” she explains.

But as she called department stores, she was disappointed to find few hired Black performers to play the role.

“Who will be the Santa Claus? Will you, by any chance, have a Black Santa Claus available?” Lana Therese would ask. Some of the responses she would receive were not kind.

One answer in particular sticks out in her mind even today: “We can’t do that in this neighbourhood. Nobody would want that or understand that.”

That reaction frustrated Lana Therese. She remembered a time when the only roles she saw Black people playing in popular media were maids.

“Representation is important. It’s important to be able to know that, yes, Santa Claus can be Black,” Lana Therese explains.

It’s not necessarily bad or wrong for people to want to seek out a white Santa Claus, she adds. “The only thing that makes it wrong is when I’m denied my opportunity to see it and experience it in a way that’s consistent with me.”

But change has been stirring, slowly, ploddingly. In 2015, the technology company Apple debuted diverse Santa emojis for mobile phones and computers. In 2021, Disney theme parks included Black Santa Clauses in their holiday festivities.

And in 2020, when an Arkansas family faced harassment for an inflatable Black Santa on their lawn, neighbours responded by buying Black Santa ornaments of their own to line the street.

Basketball star Baron Davis stumbled across that same unifying power by accident. Injured during a season with the New York Knicks, he faced the prospect of going to a costume party — but had no costume. The only thing he could find to wear was a Santa Claus suit.

Out he went in the big red coat and pointy red hat. “Because I was injured still, I wasn’t supposed to be walking around a lot. So I just found a place to plop,” Davis explains.

But partygoers seemed to instantly engage with the costume. “Random people just start coming up to me talking to me,” Davis remembers.

“It really didn’t dawn on me until the night was over, and I was like, ‘Whoa, this Santa Claus thing was a hit. There are no Black Santas.’”

Davis has since launched The Black Santa Company, part of his multimedia company UWish, as a way of sharing the “spirit of positivity” he experienced.

“That’s the true nature of a Santa, right? When you think about it, it is to disarm and to be jolly and friendly,” Davis says. “It’s magic. It’s wish fulfilment. It’s dreaming.”

He adds that Santa Clauses can be a way of dismantling harmful stereotypes around the Black experience. “Santa Claus has such a great reputation. Why can’t that reputation also be someone African American?”

Looking back at the events of a half-century ago, Moss admits he did not realise the impact his protest would have to this day. He insists he thought of the Black Santa Claus gig as a stepping stone to other roles in the retail hierarchy: chairman, president or CEO.

But in newspapers at the time, whether through misquotation, omission or the magic of the moment, a grander vision unfurled.

“If a department store cannot conceive of a black man as a Santa Claus for 30 days”, Moss was quoted as saying, “it most assuredly cannot conceive of him being a President or Vice President for 365 days”.

However, for Moss, achieving acceptance for Black Santa Clauses was never an end in and of itself. Rather, he sees it as an “inch of progress” in a long historic struggle towards equality.

And that struggle continues, he says firmly. It’s for us to stay in the fight.