Marketing justice: the Christmas Boycott

ABSTRACT This article explores the tension over whether to boycott Christmas in 1963 to protest the murder of six children in Birmingham, Alabama. The Association of Artists for Freedom, formed in the aftermath of the murders, was led by John O. Killens, James Baldwin, Odetta, Louis Lomax, Ruby Dee, and Ossie Davis. They took a leadership role in condemning the murders and demanding a national response; they called for the first national no-spending Christmas Boycott. Instead of a more traditional quid-pro-quo boycott that sought to exact demands of a company or a community, this boycott sought to use financial angst to compel a reckoning with racial justice. The broad appeal of the Christmas boycott emerged out of a growing recognition of the economic power Blacks had acquired. The boycott was intended to force a larger conversation and shift in behavior. Beyond shining the light on discrimination and violence in the South, the creative leaders imagined those in the West, the Midwest, and the North also being forced to confront their own racism and the institutionalized ways that racism pervaded the nation.