The 1963 Black Christmas boycott: when Greenville, North Carolina turned off its Christmas lights
In November and December of 1963, most Black families in Greenville, North Carolina kept their homes dark for Christmas. No lights on the tree, none in the windows, none outside. The blackout was a protest against downtown businesses that refused to hire Black workers for the holiday season, and it became known as the Black Christmas boycott, or the Christmas Sacrifice. The Wikipedia article on Christmas lights gives it a single paragraph. This is the longer story, drawn from the sources that record it.
Greenville in 1963
Black residents made up more than a third of Greenville's population in 1963. Under Jim Crow laws and the customs of segregation, most downtown businesses would not hire Black workers, and the Christmas shopping season, when stores took on extra help, made that exclusion plain. The jobs existed; Black residents were shut out of them.
The holiday season was also when downtown merchants earned the most. That made it the point where the Black community's spending carried the most weight.
From a shopping boycott to a blackout
The Progressive Citizens Council first organized a boycott of Christmas goods at the downtown businesses with discriminatory hiring: gifts, decorations, Christmas lights and holiday foods. A disagreement with Greenville's Interracial Committee over how to run the boycott changed its form. The protest settled on something quieter and more visible: a blackout of Christmas lights.
Black households in Greenville left their lights off for the season. Lights stayed off on Christmas trees, inside homes and outside on porches and rooflines. According to the record kept by the North Carolina Mayors' Co-operating Committee, only six houses in the Black community broke the boycott that Christmas.
Why the lights mattered
By the early 1960s, outlining a house with Christmas lights had become a common sight on American streets, especially in the new tract-housing neighborhoods of the postwar years. Lights were one of the most public parts of Christmas: anyone driving through a neighborhood could see which homes were lit.
That is what made the blackout work as a protest. A boycott of stores is hard to see from the street. A whole community of dark houses in December is not. Every unlit home was a visible, silent statement that the community was withholding both its spending and its celebration until it was treated fairly.
Part of a national movement
Greenville's blackout was one of several Christmas boycotts during the civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had encouraged Black Americans to abstain from Christmas shopping in 1960, and Medgar Evers directed a Christmas boycott in Jackson, Mississippi in December 1962.
1963 sharpened the call. In September, James Baldwin urged a massive campaign of civil disobedience in a speech at New York's Community Church. That same month, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama killed four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. After the bombing and the assassination of President Kennedy in November, artists and activists called for that Christmas to be a "Black Christmas," a national boycott in memory of those killed and in protest of segregation and racial violence.
What it changed
The blackout worked. The North Carolina Mayors' Co-operating Committee, reviewing race relations across the state the following year, wrote: "The blackout was very successful… the experience gave the Negro a sense of unity that he has generally lacked."
The economic result came the next Christmas. In 1964, Greenville saw a large increase in the hiring of Black employees for the holiday season, the outcome the boycott had been organized to win.
Remembering it
Most histories of Christmas lights are about inventions and spectacle: Edward H. Johnson's hand-wired tree in 1882, the first strings of manufactured lamps, the famous displays that draw crowds every December. The Greenville blackout is a different kind of history. It shows that a string of lights on a house has always been more than decoration. It is a public signal, and in 1963 a community in eastern North Carolina used the absence of that signal to demand fair treatment, and won.
Sources
North Carolina Mayors' Co-operating Committee. North Carolina and the Negro (1964), eds. Capus M. Waynick, John C. Brooks and Elsie W. Pitts, p. 94.
Black Christmas boycott and Christmas lights, Wikipedia.
What Was The Black Christmas Boycott Of 1963?, America's Black Holocaust Museum.
Black Christmas in American Department Stores, Organization of American Historians.
Frequently asked questions
What was the Black Christmas boycott?
A civil rights protest in Greenville, North Carolina in November and December 1963. Black residents boycotted Christmas goods at downtown businesses that refused to hire Black workers for the holiday season, and most Black households left their Christmas lights off.
Why was it also called the Christmas Sacrifice?
Families gave up their own Christmas celebration, including lights, decorations and holiday shopping, to put economic and public pressure on discriminatory businesses.
How many households broke the boycott?
According to the North Carolina Mayors' Co-operating Committee, only six houses in Greenville's Black community displayed Christmas lights that year.
Did the Black Christmas boycott work?
Yes. In 1964, Greenville saw a large increase in the hiring of Black employees for the Christmas season, and the state mayors' committee described the blackout as very successful.