Like many aspects of American culture, Christmas symbols are often intertwined with race. The depiction of Santa Claus as Black has a long and complex history, dating back to the early 20th century.
Many are familiar with the origins of Santa Claus being tied to St. Nicholas of Myra, a region in Turkey. After losing his parents at a young age Nicholas used his inheritance to assist the needy, the sick, and the suffering. He dedicated his life to serving God and was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man.
In America most of our popular conceptions of Santa Claus, however, can be traced to 1823 when the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (aka “The Night Before Christmas”) was published in the Troy Sentinel. It was also during the latter half of the 19th century that much of the Santa Claus mythology took root, including his North Pole residence. During the 20th century, ad campaigns by competing soda drink companies Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, and White Rock Beverages all depicted Santa Claus in his now iconic red and white suit.
In his BBC News piece, “Secret History of Black Santas,” Brian Wheeler uncovers a long tradition of depicting ol’ St. Nick as Black as far back as the turn of the 20th century. As the 20th century progressed ‘Black Santas’ were largely concentrated in African-American communities such as Harlem. For example, famed tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson suited up as Santa Claus in 1936 in Harlem for a children’s party.
By the time of the Civil Right Movement, Black Santa became one of the many symbols of integration as groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) pushed for the inclusion of Black men to appear as Santa Claus in prominent department stores such as Macy’s.
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In 2016, the decision by the Mall of America to host their first Black Santa in the mall’s history initially received a positive response, only later to be met with scorn and backlash on social media. Along with the fictional “War on Christmas,” there appears to be a campaign to ‘Make Santa White Again’ as in the recent case of an African-American family in North Little Rock, Arkansas who received a racist message from a white neighbor for displaying a Black Santa on their lawn.
Some believe that diversifying symbols like Santa Claus can assist us in creating a more inclusive and tolerant society. A white Santa for whites, a Black Santa for Blacks, and so on, doesn’t change the racial hierarchy. We never refer to white Santa as “white Santa,” he’s just Santa Claus. When some Black parents insist on a Black Santa their perceptive children quickly retort “Santa is white.” This means that these children of color have already imbibed the normalcy of whiteness.
This was most famously reflected in the “doll test” developed by Kenneth and Mamie Clark as evidence of the harmful effects of Jim Crow segregation. The results of this experiment were used by the NAACP-Legal Defense Fund in its challenge to separate-but-equal education in the Brown v. In 2006, a similar study showed African-American children still labeling a Black doll “bad.” Both ABC, in 2009, and CNN’s Anderson Cooper in 2010, replicated the doll test for a national audience.
The Personal Connection to Black Santa
Many people have a personal connection to Black Santa decorations. This was my first black Santa, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He sat among the pine cones and garland decorating a side table in the home of my parents’ friends, The Robinsons. “Where did you get him? “I asked Mrs. Robinson. She told me she made him and explained that she was inspired to make him because she, too, had never seen a Black Santa. At the end of our family’s visit that day, she wrapped up the Santa and gave him to me with a warm, “Merry Christmas!”
Until then, I had always pictured the Santa described in "Twas the Night Before Christmas,” the one with “cheeks like roses, and a nose like a cherry.” Not surprising. After all, the department store Santas, the parade float Santas, and the movie Santas all fit that description. I enjoyed that Santa, even though he didn’t fit in my real brown-skinned girl life.
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That first black Santa remains a treasured possession, but he is no longer the only one I have. From the moment I got him, I was a woman possessed, looking for the scarce black Santas everywhere. I scored my best finds outside of the holiday season when the weather is decidedly un-Christmas-y. I scooped them up in Christmas shops all around the country, and got lucky in flea and craft markets. I now have about 40 or so black Santas (honestly I’ve lost count). They are a carefully curated collection that includes gifts from family members and pals who know of my obsession.
Tall Santa always graces my living room during the season, but now the first black Santa is in my office nestled on a red runner where he is flanked by nine other ceramic mocha and mahogany Santas. That number doesn’t include the huge black Santa face hanging on my door. My coworkers now expect to see my black Santas. My colleague Henry Santoro greeted their return this year with his signature,” Blanta’s back!”
Happily, these days it’s a bit easier to find black Santas for sale, and on public display. And this year Santa Larry made a big splash at the Mall of America in Minneapolis when his four-day, appointment-only stint nearly sold out. Army veteran Larry Jefferson-Gamble, who is African-American, drew a racially mixed crowd-African-Americans, and a lot of white and Latino kids, too. Santa Larry told the Huffington Post, “Kids love Santa no matter what color you are.”
Not everybody was happy to see him. There were racist tweets complaining about Larry’s mall appearance. I saw that as an echo of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly’s 2013 declaration, “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white.” Sorry Megyn, you’re just wrong.
I love my black Santas and I don’t care if certain people can’t see Santa as I do. So, until Christmas Day, I’ll be wearing my black Santa pin, and enjoying my black Santa display, lifted by the spirit of the season.
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Here are some of Callie's favorite black Santas:
- Negro League Baseball Collection: Explore the rich history and legacy of Negro League Baseball.
- Wishum Gregory Collection: A collection of historical montages that trace the arc of African American achievement through powerful montages.
- RBG Forever: A brand that celebrates Black heritage and empowers change-makers.
A diverse collection of Black Santa figures.
The Civil Rights Movement and Black Santa Clauses
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.
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, portrayed by Andre Parker, greets children at the Georgia Parent Teacher Association in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 21, 2023.
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.
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. 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.
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 with Segregation
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?
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.
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.
From his home in Duncanville, Texas, Larry Jefferson greets children via computer as Santa Claus during the COVID-19 pandemic on December 9, 2020.
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.
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.
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.
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.
🎅✨ The Magical History of Santa Claus: From Saint Nicholas to Modern-Day Icon 🎄🦌on
A Santa Claus poses for a photograph at Abidjan Mall in Abidjan on the Ivory Coast on December 19, 2017.
In 2018, children from around the world are still taught about the most popular holiday mascot in history: Santa Claus. The large, bearded and jolly figure continues to captivate the hearts of children across continents. Jefferson wore a red suit and a Santa hat and sat down in his throne, taking pictures with hundreds of children every day. The Mall generally received positive feedback about employing its first black Santa Claus. Many parents praised the decision, citing the value for their children to see Santa Claus as a person of the same skin color as them.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s coverage of the act received many racist and derogatory comments on its online article. The legend of Santa Claus is very loosely based on the real life person, Saint Nicholas. St. Nicholas lived around the fourth century in what is now present-day Turkey. This means that St.
In the early 20th century, there were accounts of black men dressing up as Santa, usually being met with racial slurs and insults. In the 1960s, black Santa Claus became a symbol in the civil rights movement as a form of black empowerment. Many activists called out the portrayal of Santa as a white man as an example of whitewashing even childrens’ stories. More and more black Santas got hired to work in malls and department stores nationwide the following decade. Among them was the famous Macy’s flagship store in Manhattan.
Though Santa Claus is a fictional character, there is not a fixed mold that determines what skin color he is. Rather, it should depend on how the people that love him perceive him. After all, Santa delivers presents to good-hearted children from all over the world, regardless of race, ethnicity or nationality. A black boy should be able to think and see Santa Claus, a caring and joyful person, as someone that looks like him.
