Kemet1luv's article
Although unknown to the black community, the American Santa Claus’s history and character derived from the Knights of the KUX KLUX KLANS version of an elder Klans member; known as a "Grand Dragon Klansman. The modern day Santa Claus was created during a stage in the Klan's history of internal restructuring and public relations rebranding. The KKK was preparing to go underground and autonomous to all jurisdictions, they were preparing for physiological warfare; and Santa Claus became the poster child of their charitable movement in the United States.
The image of the ‘American Santa Claus (KLAWS)’ is generally depicted as a fat, jolly, old white-bearded fart wearing a red coat with white fur collar and cuffs, white-fur-cuffed red trousers, and black leather belt and boots; this is nearly the exact same uniform of a Klansman.
This controversial folklore notably derives from St Nicholas (known in Dutch as Sinterklaas, a slave master who arrives by ship to Europe every year with his slaves ‘black Peters’ and gifts for well-behaved white children), merged with the English character ‘Father Christmas’, and further refined by the white supremacist over the early twentieth and late ninetieth century became the English-speaking word as “Santa Claus”.
After the Civil War, whites in America awoke to a new reality, the collective power of black Americans, economically and politically. This new collective power held by blacks was seen as a threat and the newly formed Kux Klux Klan were destined to usurp ALL power away from black citizens. This destructive agenda was implemented in the most violent ways imaginable, through many massacres and murderous riots. The Klan used Santa Claus also known as a "KrisKringle" as their ‘Grand Dragon Santa Claus’. No other massacre shows this bold, absurd use of the KKK's newly imagined Santa than in the ‘Vicksburg Massacre of 1874’.
THE VICKSBURG MASSACRE & SANTA
In the first few years after the Civil War, white Confederate veterans developed the KUX KLUX KLAN, beginning in the northern states; it begin to open chapters throughout the South and attacked black families at their homes, places of business, and openly in the streets. By the mid-1870s, new white paramilitary groups had arisen in the Deep South, including the 'Red Shirts' in Mississippi, as whites struggled to regain political and social power over the black majority. Elections were marked by violence and fraud as whites worked to suppress black voting power.
Shit hit the fan in August 1874 a black Sheriff, Peter Cosby, was elected in Vicksburg. Letters by a white farmer, and former plantation owner, Mr. Batchelor, detail the preparations of whites for what he described as a "race war", including acquisition of the newest guns, the Winchester 16 mm.
On December 7, 1874, white men disrupted a black Republican meeting celebrating Cosby's victory and kidnapped him, tortured him, before running him out of town. Sheriff Cosby, advised ALL blacks from rural areas to return home, or find immediate emergency shelter; during this all out race war, and purge, heavily armed whites attacked innocent blacks wherever they found them, murdering them in the streets.
Twenty-first century historians estimates that over 300 black citizens were killed in the city and the surrounding area of Claiborne County. The KKK’s Red Shirts were active in Vicksburg and other Mississippi areas, and black pleas to the federal government for protection fell on deaf ears to then President Ulysses S. Grant. The governor of Mississippi, Adelbert Ames, who had purposefully left the state during the race war eventually, sent a request to Grant for federal troops 5 months after the purge had begin.
That very Christmas season of 1874 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the ‘Red shirts’ held a huge Santa Klaws parade, organized by the Santa Klaws Klan, they proceeded through the streets of the city, cheered by the white citizens for their victory in the race war. The Santa Klaws chief,a ‘Grand Dragon Santa’ rode through the parade in a four-horse chariot, distributed gifts to the blood thirst white citizenry. The ‘Santa Klaws’ parade came just weeks after the massacre. The ‘Grand Marshal’ of the ‘Santa Klaws’ parade in Vicksburg, Mississippi was ‘Santa’ dressed in the uniform of a ‘Grand Dragon Klansman’, the parade was used by the Klan as a display of white triumph over blacks and a celebration of the end to black economic and political power in Vicksburg. The Klan’s use of Christmas was meant to convey a return to normality and a world of white supremacy.
Following an investigation by congress into the massacre, as reported by the New York Times in 1874, no one was ever prosecuted for the deaths, and ‘The Red Shirts KKK’ and other white insurgent terrorist suppressed voting blacks in large numbers and launched multiple other riots killing many blacks during the elections of 1875.
GRAND DRAGON SANTA ARRIVES
In the early twentieth century, things had dramatically changed, blacks begin to openly reject and organize against the Klan; and for the new Kux Klux Klan, the goal was respectability and a place in the mainstream of white Protestant politics. During their revival and recruitment of hundreds of thousands of new members in in the 1920’s, the Klan sought to gloss over their terrorist past and themselves as the voice of the middle class, angry about urbanization, and internal migration by blacks into the northern Klan states in large numbers. The Klan wished to distance itself from the image as violent, murderous terrorist night-riders, who murdered thousands of black men, women, and children, and adopt the image of concerned citizens, serving the community, as the Masons, theLions Club, the Elks, and theRotarians; and to that end the Christmas season was used to show their charitable side.
In Indianapolis, Indiana, the home state of the KKK, during the Christmases of 1922 & 1923 the Klan attracted publicity with their distribution of truckloads of food and clothing to poor families by Santa Claus, including, they were happy to point out, black families. In Atlanta the Klan donated money to the ‘Christmas fund’ for former slaves; in Richmond the contributed to the upkeep of the African American old folks’ home, often bringing a ‘Grand Dragon Santa Claus’ along for an appearance; in Buffalo, the ‘Protestant Home for Unprotected Children’ received warm clothing for 150 kids, the Times printed a photograph showing hooded Klansmen and their Grand Dragon Santa Claus, presenting an elderly black couple with a radio. In Detroit and SALT Lake City masked Santas opened many of the Klans Christmas rallies, and parades. Masked Santas were also used for collecting money for Kux Klux Klan Charities… HO HO HO!!!
The Klan’s attempt to make use of Christmas and Santa Claus as an effective public relations tool continued into the late 1920’s & 1930’s, and in 1933 their bid to erect a burning cross at the Columbus, Ohio, Christmas display erupted into controversy, leading to a court decision that protected the Kux Klux Klan’s right to free expression.
BLACKS CHRISTMAS &BLACK SANTA
The great Civil Rights struggles in the United States during the 1960’s spawned a number of attempts to use Christmas to advance blacks Americans rights. During the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955-1956 lead by the M.L.King. King suggested a boycott og holiday spending in white downtown stores; the money could be saved or given to charity or the Montgomery Improvement Association. Activists learned that threats to the white establishment’s pocketbook were an effective tool, and so was born the “Black Christmas” movement amongst black Christian activist in American cities. At the time, few if any in the black community decorated their homes in support of the young commandos, an NAACP youth group.
But, in 1968 things begin to change, and after the death of King and various others in the Civil Rights movement the “Black Christmas” movement, although flawed, became corrupted by white influences, politicians, and obscure Klansmen posing as white moderates working from with in the Civil Rights movement to under mind the collective power of blacks as it had been successful in Vicksburg in 1874.
To expand upon the notion of “Black Christmas”, Christmas parades sponsored by the ‘Black Solidarity Committee for Community Improvement’ begin to march through North Carolina the same time as white Christmas Parades; bands played, beauty queens waved from decorated floats, and not to be out done by their Protestant Christian rivals, the Black Church, as corrupt as it is, for the FIRST TIME presented a ‘Black Santa Claus’, a direct variation of the Klans ‘Grand Dragon Santa’ that terrorized the black community for decades, who then proceeded to threw candy to children and sang “Merry Christmas!!!”
The white exploitation and of Christmas & Santa Claus (Klaws) as a tool of white supremacy continues to this day. The very image of Santa and his Klan uniform has been criticized for its racial exclusion and racist historical past in the Netherlands and Spain. Today, however, Santa has achieved a sort of respectability, recognized on American postal stamps and in Presidential greetings, visualized as an imperial white God of goodness and charity. One can say the Kux Klux Klan successfully integrated its image, and fortitude, into American pop culture, and even made blacks except him into their homes.
