Jesse Jackson: Christmas is poor people’s holy day
2009 photo/Eric Guo, cropped by Beyond My Ken via wikicommons
Looking back just five years, here’s the thoughts from Rev. Jackson
From December 3rd’s Rainbow PUSH Saturday Morning Forum (2011), broadcast nationally on the Word Network, Jesse Jackson spoke of Christmas, addressing “non-Christian” merchants who “use Jesus to lure you in to Santa Claus’s birthday party:
This (Christmas) is a holy day for the poor, not a holiday for the merchants. I once heard some people that I know say that when Christmas Eve is over, they have midnight services in the back of their shops. These were non-Christian people I was, they say we, say every December 24th around midnight we have, we close our shops and we’re not Christian but we start singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” We use Jesus to lure you into Santa Claus’s birthday party and unless you have the holiday spirit, which is his songs, his wine, and his stuff you’re not welcome at the party of the man whose party it is. This is, Christmas should be a poor people’s holy day.
In 1969, he announced his second “Black Christmas” boycott of white merchants. According to the Chicago Tribune at the time, Jackson claimed his initiative would include “a parade and the appearance in Negro areas, hospitals, and jails of ‘Soul Saint,’ a black Santa Claus.”
In their 1985 book “Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race,” authors Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn write of the Soul Saint “who, according to Jackson, came from the South Pole rather than the North Pole and lingered along the equator sufficiently to take up wearing a dashiki of black, with yellow, red and green trimmings — the colors of the flag of Ghana. Henceforth, the Soul Saint would preside over the season of Christmas, a black figure whose gifts were not toys or sugar plums but ‘love, justice, peace, and power.'”
