fishing gear
The war in Gaza has become a new flashpoint between Canada’s largest protestant church and Jewish groups, who say that the famously activist church is dividing Canadians with its “unhealthy obsession with Israel and Jews.” In recent months, the church has made a number of statements vociferously opposing Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, launched in retaliation for the October 7 Hamas attacks. In August, Rev. Michael Blair, the church’s general secretary, wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau , urging Ottawa to suspend diplomatic relations with Israel until it complied with an opinion from the International Court of Justice , which concluded that Israel’s “continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” referring to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “This is the first time that we are asking for Canada to issue this kind of sanction on the State of Israel, because, clearly, quiet diplomacy is not working,” Blair wrote. Then, in mid-November, it called upon the Canadian government to implement a complete arms embargo, adopt sanctions against Israel and officially declare Israel an apartheid state just weeks after it endorsed the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and recognized Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as apartheid. The statement, calling Israel’s war in Gaza “ethic cleansing and genocide,” and its reference to “Israeli state-sponsored terror,” represent the outcome of a years-long process of the church attempting to sort out its positions on the conflict between Israel and Palestinians. Richard Marceau, the vice-president, external affairs, with the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, said that the United Church is on a “problematic trajectory,” and that it began many years ago. “Nobody in Israel cares what the United Church of Canada says or does. No one. Where it can have an impact is in Canada,” said Marceau. “So, instead of bringing people together, to get people to closer together, despite fundamental differences, what the United Church is doing is actually pulling people apart. It is singling out Israel, which is central to Canadian Jewish identity.” While it is dwarfed by the number of Catholics in the country, who numbered nearly 11 million in 2021, about 1.2 million Canadians are affiliated with the United Church. The tension between the United Church and Canadian Jewish groups isn’t new. Japhet Ndhlovu, the United Church’s head of mission who oversees global justice work, said in an interview that the church has been consistent for years. The church condemned the October 7 attacks and has been “consistent in asking for the release of all those that were abducted by the terrorists,” Ndhlovu said, but it has also spoken out against the death toll from Israel’s military operation against Hamas in the Gaza strip and the expansion of the conflict into neighbouring Lebanon. “I would say that the United Church stand has never changed,” said Ndhlovu. “Of course, the reactions to what the United Church has said over the years has taken different twists and turns, and it depends on the people that are responding.” After the Second World War, as the revelations of the Holocaust became better known, support within the church for Israel grew, though not officially; the church had been conflicted in its stance on Zionism and Jewish persecution in Europe. “The horror of our people expressed itself in the support of the establishment of Israel. The only guard against a repeat of such mass destruction was a strong Israeli nation with secure borders,” A.B.B. Moore, a prominent United Church minister, wrote to Israeli academic Haim Genizi in 1995. Still, by 1954, the church was objecting to the way Israel had expanded, according to Genizi’s book, The Holocaust, Israel and Canadian Protestant Churches. The church’s Committee on Church and International Affairs condemned the use of force that accompanied Israel’s expansion, while imploring Israel’s Arab neighbours to accept Israel and “learn to live with her as a neighbour.” Within a couple years, though, Genizi writes that the church had “adopted a position that delegitimized Israel’s right to exist, on the grounds that the establishment of the State was based on moral injustice to the Palestinians.” The church’s newspaper — editorially independent but indicative of the trends of the time — the United Church Observer, was “almost without exception unsympathetic to Israel and to the Zionist movement” by the time Israel fought the Six-Day War in 1967. The newspaper, and prominent church members and editorialists, were denounced by some Jewish, Christian and Catholic thinkers for criticisms of Zionism that veered into antisemitism. Anti-Zionism sooner or later reveals a distressing tendency to shade into antisemitism “Anti-Zionism sooner or later reveals a distressing tendency to shade into antisemitism,” wrote Alan T. Davis, a United Church minister, in a 1970 essay in the Christian Century, a magazine publishing in Chicago. The internal church debates seemingly quieted for a few decades as the church dealt with other issues, including reckoning with its role in the residential school system, declining church membership and its approach to social issues. Judaism more broadly, however, did receive some attention in 1997, when a church report concluded that Christians should stop trying to convert Jews to Christianity. But over the past 20 or so years, the church has once again taken positions on the conflict between Israel and Palestinians. In 2003, the United Church adopted a report that sketched out the centuries of Christian antisemitism. “We know that the Christian tradition for over 1,900 years plus, can be condemned to be antisemitic,” said Ndhlovu. It also affirmed that Israel had a right to exist and that criticisms of Israel “that dwell on its Jewish identity rather than the exigencies of power as the cause of its real or imagined misdeeds are highly suspect.” However, relations between the United Church and Canadian Jewish organizations deteriorated in 2012, when the church urged Canadians to not purchase goods made by Jewish settlers in the West Bank. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs promptly announced its own boycott of the United Church and called on Canadian Jews, including rabbis and community organizations, to make a “wholesale break” with the church, including severing ties with interfaith groups that include the United Church and ending any educational interactions. Since then, attempts have been made to reknit those ties, including in 2022 when the church vowed to build an antisemitism education campaign. Since it was founded in 1925 by way of a merger between a handful of other mainline protestant organizations, the United Church has championed many progressive political causes, including universal health care, sanctuary for Vietnam draft dodgers and, since the 1980s, LGBT rights. In the background to all of this, the church had been working to develop what it calls justice-based principles that guide its stance on issues in foreign nations, where it has numerous partners and local connections. This includes its perspective not just on Israel and the Palestinian territories, but on other governments and areas, such as the Philippines and El Salvador. Back in 2021, the church’s general council — the top decision-making body — received a report on how the church should approach the tensions between Israel and Palestinians. Martha ter Kuile chaired the task force that authored the report and recalled to the National Post that the last time the policy had been updated was in 2012, and it was necessary to revisit the policies. “The 2012 policy wasn’t quite meeting the need,” ter Kuile said. The report her task force produced, after three years of work, suggested the United Church could support the principles of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (and rejected the idea that BDS is inherently antisemitic) and refer to Israel as an apartheid state, though the report stopped short of calling on the church to take particular actions. It also developed a set of overall justice principles that inform the church’s social justice work. “Christ does not call us to be polite or to walk some middle line until all parties are appeased, but rather, Christ calls us to stand in costly solidarity with those who seem most at risk of losing the fullness of life that God intends for all people,” the report says. That report also grapples with whether or not the United Church should continue to refer to Israel as a Jewish state. “Using the language of ‘Jewish state’ vis á vis Israel will likely be interpreted as implying support for Israel’s Nation State Law,” the report says. That law, passed in Israel’s Knesset in 2018, says that Israel’s right to self-determination is “unique to the Jewish people.” The objection of the church report’s authors is, essentially, that this does not grant equal rights to non-Jews in Israel, and that the church’s support of Israel as a Jewish state “is specifically qualified as a state which extends equal rights and dignity to all its citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity.” Those proposals were not adopted at the church’s 2022 general council, although a later proposal, which called on the church to further the ideas contained in the 2021 report, was adopted. By October 2024, the church’s general council adopted a policy declaring Israel an apartheid state and supporting BDS as a means of non-violent protest. “When they accuse Israel of being an apartheid state, what they’re doing, in effect, is negating the right of Jews to self determination, and saying that their their right to self determination, which is a state of Israel, is inherently racist and tainted,” said Marceau. “The next step is that it should not exist. They’re not saying it out loud but when you decode the language, that’s where it leads.” Pro-Israel groups have also long argued that the BDS movement is antisemitic. “It has become like any criticism, any criticism of the nation of Israel, the pro-Israel lobby groups will come up with antisemitism,” countered Ndhlovu. “So all we are supposed to do is maybe keep quiet and just allow the violence to continue, and then we’ll be told, ‘Yes, now you are in support of Israel.'” Marceau called the church’s stance an “unhealthy obsession with Israel and Jews,” and that it could in part explain the church’s declining influence in Canada. “The negative comments are an indication that there is actually an effect there,” said Ndhlovu. “The very fact that they have responded, I think, for us, is a sign that there is some success there. They are listening, they’re hearing, and that’s why they are reacting the way they are reacting.” Even within the church, however, there isn’t entirely a consensus on the Middle East. John Ryerson, a Toronto social justice activist and United Church member, has criticized the church for its use of the term “genocide,” in particular, calling it a “trigger word.” “They jumped on the genocide bandwagon very early. They took a side and stopped conversation,” said Ryerson. Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here .
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President-elect Donald Trump has once again suggested he wants to revert the name of North America’s tallest mountain — Alaska's Denali — to Mount McKinley, wading into a sensitive and decades-old conflict about what the peak should be called. Former President Barack Obama changed the official name to Denali in 2015 to reflect the traditions of Alaska Natives as well as the preference of many Alaska residents. The federal government in recent years has endeavored to change place-names considered disrespectful to Native people. “Denali” is an Athabascan word meaning “the high one" or “the great one.” A prospector in 1896 dubbed the peak “Mount McKinley” after President William McKinley, who had never been to Alaska. That name was formally recognized by the U.S. government until Obama changed it over opposition from lawmakers in McKinley's home state of Ohio. Trump suggested in 2016 that he might undo Obama's action, but he dropped that notion after Alaska's senators objected. He raised it again during a rally in Phoenix on Sunday. “McKinley was a very good, maybe a great president,” Trump said Sunday. “They took his name off Mount McKinley, right? That’s what they do to people.” Once again, Trump's suggestion drew quick opposition within Alaska. “Uh. Nope. It’s Denali,” Democratic state Sen. Scott Kawasaki posted on the social platform X Sunday night. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski , who for years pushed for legislation to change the name to Denali, conveyed a similar sentiment in a post of her own. “There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali — the Great One,” Murkowski wrote on X. Various tribes of Athabascan people have lived in the shadow of the 20,310-foot (6,190-meter) mountain for thousands of years. McKinley, a Republican native of Ohio who served as the 25th president, was assassinated early in his second term in 1901 in Buffalo, New York. Alaska and Ohio have been at odds over the name since at least the 1970s. Alaska had a standing request to change the name since 1975, when the legislature passed a resolution and then-Gov. Jay Hammond appealed to the federal government. Known for its majestic views, the mountain is dotted with glaciers and covered at the top with snow year-round, with powerful winds that make it difficult for the adventurous few who seek to climb it. ___ Rush reported from Portland, Oregon. Claire Rush, The Associated Press
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Published 5:39 pm Sunday, November 24, 2024 By Data Skrive Top-25 teams will take the court across eight games on Monday’s college basketball slate. That includes the Duke Blue Devils taking on the Kansas State Wildcats at Lee’s Family Forum. Watch women’s college basketball, other live sports and more on Fubo. What is Fubo? Fubo is a streaming service that gives you access to your favorite live sports and shows on demand. Use our link to sign up for a free trial. Catch tons of live women’s college basketball , plus original programming, with ESPN+ or the Disney Bundle.How Black Santa Clauses shaped the US civil rights movement 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. Rising seven floors from the corner of West Seventh and Elm, Shillito’s was the commercial heart of the Ohio city. And Christmas time was its peak season. Year after year, pedestrians gathered under the sweeping limestone edifice to marvel at its window displays, brimming with twinkling lights and festive tableaus: animated “snow people” skating across a frozen pond, or tiny animals and elves acting out holiday scenes. The excitement was so great that, for two years in a row, newspapers reported that the “crush of onlookers” created a “human traffic jam” on the pavement. But amid the bustle and merrymaking, Moss and his colleagues saw a lack. It was early December 1969, and leaders in the United States civil rights movement were continuing to push for equal opportunity for Americans of all races. 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.” An evolving image Santa Claus. Sinterklaas. Saint Nicholas. Over the centuries, the Christmastime legend has worn many hats: the pointy mitre of a fourth-century bishop, a crown wreathed in spiked holly leaves, a red hood rimmed with white fur. But in the United States, what race Santa is presented as remains a controversial topic. 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. It was the same perspective that Moss had encountered more than half a century prior. He and five of his colleagues from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had requested a meeting with Shillito’s top brass — and they got it. 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. Moss remembers Lazarus as an ordinary man. Nothing remarkable. But in his hands was the power to reshape US commerce. A greying man in his late 50s, with thick eyebrows and a thinning hairline, Lazarus was the scion of one of the most prominent retail empires in the country. His was the family behind the Federated Department Stores, a conglomerate that included some of the biggest department stores in the country: Filene’s in Boston, Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn, Bloomingdale’s in New York. His ancestors had been in the retail business since 1851. Their stores were among the first to pioneer modern conveniences like escalators, air conditioning and fixed prices. Lazarus’s father even successfully petitioned President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939 to move the Thanksgiving holiday to a whole week earlier, to extend the Christmas shopping season. Lazarus, a World War II veteran and graduate of Yale University, eventually joined the family business. Newspapers glowingly praised him as “a driving force behind the rebirth of downtown Cincinnati”. 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. Lazarus’s chilly dismissal ignited Moss’s resolve. “We left that meeting with an insult, but with heightened determination that protest was not only needed but absolutely necessary,” Moss recalls. 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 Growing up in the countryside on the outskirts of LaGrange, Georgia, Moss attended a one-room public schoolhouse. When it burned down, the county did not bother to rebuild it, Moss says. It was a time of segregation in the southern United States, and a poorly funded, poorly supplied school for Black children was considered no great loss. So Moss and his four siblings got their education instead at the nearby Baptist church, Old Mount Olive. The five of them had grown accustomed to loss. When Moss was only four, his mother passed away. A former schoolteacher, she was only 36 years old. Moss, his three older sisters and seven-month-old baby brother were left in the care of their father, a farmer. He never remarried. “Every day I live, I have to have great admiration for my father, who took on the responsibility of a single parent of five minor children,” Moss says. Family, church and school were the three axes Moss's life revolved around during his childhood in the 1930s and '40s. He set his sights on “advancing in life and going to college”. But all around him, there was “strict segregation everywhere”. Signs labelled “coloured only” or “white only” demarcated the boundaries of who was allowed where. “This is in all public places and public transportation, in courtrooms, schoolhouses, everywhere,” Moss recalls. 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? But Christmas was also a time of imagination and creativity in Moss’s community. At school and church, songs were sung, speeches given and poetry recited. And then, of course, there was the food. Neighbours shared home-baked cookies, cakes and southern-style pies. “It was a village of remarkable spiritual support,” Moss recalls. “In the midst of an apartheid-type, Jim Crow situation, because of the creativity of parents and elders and teachers, we found a way to grow, support each other and dream.” 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. “It was September — the first or second Sunday in September 1952,” Moss recalls. “And the sermon was ‘To whom can I be a neighbour?’, taken from the parable of the Good Samaritan.” 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. A civil rights battleground 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. One young drummer boy marvels at a wind-up jack-in-the-box toy. An older soldier, stocky and bearded, lifts a stocking filled with treats. Santa Claus himself dangles a lanky wooden puppet from a string — a figure meant to mock the leader of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, a vocal defender of slavery in the southern states. 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. The year the cartoon was published marked a turning point in the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in US history. That year started with the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order from Washington, DC, declaring all enslaved people in the Confederacy to be free. It ended with key victories like the Battle of Gettysburg, which stopped the Confederacy’s advance northward, leaving it on the defensive. 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. But Black communities were also formulating their own version of Santa Claus, separate from the stereotypes designed to demean them. 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. ‘Having the world be fair’ 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. “I had been hearing the whole time [that] when you crossed St Louis — that was the Mason Dixon line — things would be different,” Gay says. “But it was just as bad here than it was down in the southern part.” He took jobs cleaning buildings, restaurants and cars at the local dealerships. The work netted him a meagre 50 cents a day, he says. His frustration led him to join the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the country’s largest and oldest civil rights organisations. “You could see things wasn't normal,” Gay says. A deeply religious man, he could not fathom the hate he was experiencing. “God loves everybody. He treats us all the same,” he explains. “And it was hard to understand why the white people would be so hard on the coloured people: hate them, take them out and hang them, and beat them up.” Gay found a kindred spirit in the late Merlin Kennedy, who became the president of the Bloomington NAACP in the 1960s. Together, they fought for fair housing and employment opportunities. Merlin’s daughter, Lana Therese Kennedy White, would often join them at protests, waving picket signs and singing the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome. A self-described tomboy, she remembers admiring her father’s bravery. At home, Merlin could be playful, leading the local Boy Scout troop and chaperoning teen sock hops. But when he was helming the picket line, he morphed into a no-nonsense leader, determined to instigate change. “My dad was really, I would say, hell-bent on having the world be fair,” Lana Therese says. “He felt things should be done right. He wanted fairness.” But the holiday season would bring Merlin and Gay their biggest platform yet. The ‘one Santa’ rule On the day of Bloomington’s annual Christmas parade, Merlin dressed for an act of defiance. He pulled on a pair of shiny black boots, slipped his arms through a fire-engine red coat and strapped on a tufted white beard that was so long, it draped halfway almost to his waist. He was Santa Claus. A Black Santa Claus. This was not Merlin’s first outing as the jolly Saint Nick. A year earlier, in 1965, his appearance had caused such a stir that the city of Bloomington implemented a new rule mandating that only one Santa should be allowed in the parade. In other words, Merlin’s Santa Claus was not welcome. But times were changing. Celebrities like the dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and the baseball legend Jackie Robinson had both incarnated the holiday legend by that time. And the department store Blumstein’s in Harlem, New York, had hired a Black Santa Claus to greet guests since 1943. It even had a mechanical holiday decoration reflecting the same style of Santa. If it could happen in New York, why not in Bloomington? On the morning of the Christmas parade, Gay, Merlin and their colleagues were prepared to march, regardless of city hall’s “one Santa” rule. They hid their float — a flatbed topped with a sleigh and a cut-out reindeer — among the leafless trees at Franklin Park, the branches bare from the cold. Gay was tasked with crowd control. Merlin’s Santa was assigned to ride on top. But as the float prepared to leave the park and enter the intersection at Main and Chestnut, a pair of police officers showed up. “They always went in twos,” Gay recalls. The officers had come to block the float from joining the parade. Gay still gets upset thinking about that moment. The officers would not budge. Gay feared he and his friends would be arrested — or worse. “See, they didn't want the Black people to do nothing. That's the thing. We wasn't supposed to be nothing,” he says. “Sometimes I think about it and I cry. Why was I treated that way?” “We’ve still got people out there that think Black people shouldn't be represented by nothing,” Gay adds. The team made a quick decision. It was time to abandon the float. “We didn't have no other choice. It was either ditch it or get beat up or go to jail,” Gay explains. Instead, they would march the parade route on foot. “They couldn’t stop you from walking,” Gay says with an audible shrug. But even from the pavement, Merlin’s Santa Claus generated a buzz. Gay was prepared for hecklers. None came. Mostly, people were surprised. For about two miles, Gay estimates Merlin travelled down the street, greeting parade-goers. He ultimately ended his march at the Bloomington courthouse, where he circled the square with a line of supporters on his heels. That day marked a shift in Gay’s mind. He remembers strangers coming up to talk to him. Everyone smiled. Even the air seemed to smell better. “Before that, there was just so much hate, you could cut it with a knife when you're walking,” he says. “Everybody had a change of heart after that. You could feel the tension just going away.” He considers that day a milestone. The presence of a Black Santa Claus was disarming. It opened people’s minds. “Just put yourself in that position. You've been telling your kid, all the years, there wasn't such a thing as a Black Santa Claus. And then the kid sees Black Santa Claus, standing close there, out of his own eyes,” Gay says. “That was the biggest turnaround in race relations that ever happened in Bloomington.” A season of protest But, as Moss would learn, the figure of Santa Claus was more than a pathway to visibility and acceptance. The holiday legend wielded vast economic power. By 1960, Moss had completed his master’s in divinity at Morehouse and was studying theology at a nearby seminary in Atlanta. But in his spare time, he was deeply enmeshed in the student-led protest movement brewing across the city. The experience gave him a firsthand view of how Christmas could be a season of protest. “We ended up organising protests and picketing during the Christmas season,” Moss recalls, as students pushed to desegregate lunch counters and stores. The movement aimed to make a dent in the businesses’ pocketbook: One of the rallying cries was to “bankrupt the economy of segregation”. By the end of the year, sales in downtown Atlanta had fallen by approximately 13 percent compared with the year prior. The Christmas boycotts were credited with costing $10m in sales. The student protesters, meanwhile, launched their own efforts to generate Christmas profits. They sold “Freedom Christmas cards”, netting more than $4,000 in sales — or nearly $43,000 in today’s money. Moss saw his participation in the Christmastime movement as part of an “inheritance” of non-violent protest. After all, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 had begun during the year-end holiday season. And later, in 1963, after white supremacists planted a bomb that killed four young girls, civil rights leaders called for a “Black Christmas” protest, with shoppers abstaining from holiday spending as a show of mourning. Moss himself remembers being on the picket line, carrying a sign that read “Jim Crow Must Go”, when he was recruited to lead a church in Cincinnati, Ohio, hundreds of kilometres to the north of Atlanta. As a newly married young man, with the first of three children on the way, Moss decided to leap at the opportunity. He knew little of the city before arriving. He had only ever passed through Cincinnati by train. It sat on the border of the northern and southern regions of the US. “If you were headed North, it was Cincinnati where the trains desegregated,” Moss says. “And if you were headed South, Cincinnati was where the trains segregated.” But north of that invisible boundary, Moss found segregation and racism were just as entrenched as in the south. He started picketing in Cincinnati almost as soon as he settled in. “I had just left the deep south where segregation or racism was on the throne,” he says. “And when I got to Cincinnati, I discovered quickly that segregation or Jim Crow was behind the throne.” One of his first efforts was against the Coca-Cola Company, one of the largest soft drink companies in the world. Moss observed they had no Black truck drivers to deliver their product. So he and his civil rights colleagues leapt into action. Their rallying cry became: “It’s no joke. We’re not drinking Coke.” No job was too big or too small to be the subject of protest. Moss and his fellow reverends and activists were determined to see equal access to employment, no matter the position. In 1969, with the holiday shopping season fast approaching, they set their sights on Cincinnati’s downtown shopping scene, with Shillito’s at its centre. The economic stakes were staggering. Retail sales in December 1969 were worth an estimated $36.2bn — about $311.4bn in today’s currency — according to an article from United Press International. This year, the National Retail Association forecasts holiday spending between November and December will rise to $989bn. For Moss, accessing that period of bustling economic activity was critical to equality, and Santa Claus was a symbol of that commerce. “Santa Claus, really, is selling toys,” Moss explains. “It is, by and large, a commercial symbol to appeal to children, which is an indirect appeal to adults to spend money to buy toys and make some people richer, while making some people, in some instances, poorer.” A symbol of inclusion But that goal put him at odds with Lazarus, the head of Shillito’s. Moss wanted to see a Black person be hired as Santa Claus. Lazarus seemed dead-set against it. Their meeting ended in a clash of wills. Moss decided it was time to bring the issue to the community. He called on Black shoppers to turn away from Shillito’s and stores that showed similar resistance to hiring Black Santa Clauses. “Tell your children that Santa Claus is a symbol,” Moss remembers saying. “And if that symbol cannot be inclusive, covering all races, then that symbol needs to go.” The campaign brought together some of the biggest names in civil rights at the time. Fred Shuttlesworth commuted back and forth from Birmingham to Cincinnati. A young Jesse Jackson travelled down from Chicago. It was one of the coldest Decembers Moss remembers spending in Cincinnati. Even during the daytime, temperatures hovered barely above freezing. And the reaction to his protest could be equally frigid. Moss admits he received “a lot of pushback” to the idea of boycotting during the holiday season. “There was some trepidation,” he explains. “Christmas is a very joyous time for some. It’s a very emotional moment to say that we must make sacrifices in doing this.” As they prepared to picket in front of Shillito’s and its famous holiday displays, Moss and his fellow protesters also had to steel themselves for harassment from police and passersby. They limited their ranks to just more than a dozen people or so. “We intentionally kept to what we might call a manageable unit,” Moss explained. “Enough people that we could call into action and, if need be, quickly call off the battlefield, so to speak.” On the chilly pavement in front of Shillito’s, they passed out flyers, denouncing the store’s stance. “To refuse a black Santa purely on tradition, color and race is a major moral blunder and a collective insult to all people of color and conscience,” the sheets explained. Some of the picket signs were even more barbed. “Welcome to the Lazarus plantation,” one read. Public pressure mounted. On December 9, Lazarus was quoted in the Cincinnati Post as offering space for a Black Santa to “sit apart” from the white one. Moss refused the proposal as “demeaning”. On December 14, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran Lazarus’s next move prominently on the front page. He and three other merchants offered a compromise. What if Cincinnati’s mayor appointed a committee of citizens to study “the black Santa issue”? The mere suggestion was an “evasion of responsibility”, Moss responded to the newspaper a few days later. “Our position was that we were beyond the point of discussing the issue, that it was time to act,” Moss says, looking back. “We didn't need a friendly discussion. We needed action.” Finally, the message Moss had been waiting for arrived. “As I recall, a representative from the department store came to us,” he says. “We started meeting from that point forward.” Lazarus himself started to backtrack on his position, issuing a public apology during the picketing. “I deeply regret that a controversy has developed as it has over the issue of a black Santa Claus,” Lazarus, who died in 1996, told local media. “It is now clear that a significant number of people do not consider a black Santa Claus to be incongruous.” There would be a Black Santa Claus at Shillito’s the very next year. And at Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn. And at Macy’s in New York. The repercussions of Moss’s protests rippled beyond Cincinnati, earning national headlines. A seed of change Decades later, Merlin Kennedy’s Santa costume would hang in the local history museum in Bloomington, Illinois, a symbol of a time of great change. But still, his daughter Lana Therese was facing the same question Merlin had once confronted: Where were all the Black Santa Clauses? As recently as 2021, the National Santa group estimated that fewer than 25 percent of Santa Claus performers were non-white, Hispanic or multiracial. Fewer than 1 percent were Black. Inspired by her father, Lana Therese had grown up to be a professional mediator, dealing largely with employment discrimination cases in southern California. She had also become a parent and a grandparent. Her youngest grandchild is now 21. Every holiday season, she would scour the nearby malls for a Black Santa Claus to entertain the children. She saw it as a tribute to her father and his protest. “The change has to begin, and sometimes it begins with small things. But if it doesn't begin somewhere, then it never happens,” she explains. But as she called department stores, she was disappointed to find few hired Black performers to play the role. “Who will be the Santa Claus? Will you, by any chance, have a Black Santa Claus available?” Lana Therese would ask. Some of the responses she would receive were not kind. One answer in particular sticks out in her mind even today: “We can't do that in this neighbourhood. Nobody would want that or understand that.” That reaction frustrated Lana Therese. She remembered a time when the only roles she saw Black people playing in popular media were maids. “Representation is important. It's important to be able to know that, yes, Santa Claus can be Black,” Lana Therese explains. It’s not necessarily bad or wrong for people to want to seek out a white Santa Claus, she adds. “The only thing that makes it wrong is when I'm denied my opportunity to see it and experience it in a way that's consistent with me.” A ‘spirit of positivity’ But change has been stirring, slowly, ploddingly. In 2015, the technology company Apple debuted diverse Santa emojis for mobile phones and computers. In 2021, Disney theme parks included Black Santa Clauses in their holiday festivities. And in 2020, when an Arkansas family faced harassment for an inflatable Black Santa on their lawn, neighbours responded by buying Black Santa ornaments of their own to line the street. Basketball star Baron Davis stumbled across that same unifying power by accident. Injured during a season with the New York Knicks, he faced the prospect of going to a costume party — but had no costume. The only thing he could find to wear was a Santa Claus suit. Out he went in the big red coat and pointy red hat. “Because I was injured still, I wasn't supposed to be walking around a lot. So I just found a place to plop,” Davis explains. But partygoers seemed to instantly engage with the costume. “Random people just start coming up to me talking to me,” Davis remembers. “It really didn't dawn on me until the night was over, and I was like, ‘Whoa, this Santa Claus thing was a hit. There are no Black Santas.’” Davis has since launched The Black Santa Company, part of his multimedia company UWish, as a way of sharing the “spirit of positivity” he experienced. “That's the true nature of a Santa, right? When you think about it, it is to disarm and to be jolly and friendly,” Davis says. “It's magic. It's wish fulfilment. It's dreaming.” He adds that Santa Clauses can be a way of dismantling harmful stereotypes around the Black experience. “Santa Claus has such a great reputation. Why can't that reputation also be someone African American?” Looking back at the events of a half-century ago, Moss admits he did not realise the impact his protest would have to this day. He insists he thought of the Black Santa Claus gig as a stepping stone to other roles in the retail hierarchy: chairman, president or CEO. But in newspapers at the time, whether through misquotation, omission or the magic of the moment, a grander vision unfurled. “If a department store cannot conceive of a black man as a Santa Claus for 30 days", Moss was quoted as saying, “it most assuredly cannot conceive of him being a President or Vice President for 365 days". However, for Moss, achieving acceptance for Black Santa Clauses was never an end in and of itself. Rather, he sees it as an “inch of progress” in a long historic struggle towards equality. And that struggle continues, he says firmly. It’s for us to stay in the fight.Bangladesh seeks to review major energy projects including one with India’s Adani Group
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WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill rallied around Pete Hegseth , Trump’s Pentagon pick, on Thursday even as new details surfaced about allegations that he had sexually assaulted a woman in 2017. The GOP embrace of Hegseth came as another controversial Trump nominee, Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration for attorney general. Gaetz said it was clear he had become a “distraction" amid pressure on the House to release an ethics report about allegations of his own sexual misconduct. An attorney for two women has said that his clients told House Ethics Committee investigators that Gaetz paid them for sex on multiple occasions beginning in 2017, when Gaetz was a Florida congressman. Fresh questions over the two nominees' pasts, and their treatment of women, arose with Republicans under pressure from Trump and his allies to quickly confirm his Cabinet. At the same time, his transition has so far balked at the vetting and background checks that have traditionally been required. While few Republican senators have publicly criticized any of Trump's nominees, it became clear after Gaetz's withdrawal that many had been harboring private concerns about him. Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, who served with Gaetz in the House, said it was a “positive move.” Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker said it was a “positive development.” Maine Sen. Susan Collins said Gaetz “put country first and I am pleased with his decision.” After meeting with Hegseth, though, Republicans rallied around him. “I think he’s going to be in pretty good shape,” said Wicker, who is expected to chair the Senate Armed Services Committee in the next Congress. Republican senators' careful words, and their early reluctance to publicly question Trump's picks, illustrated not only their fear of retribution from the incoming president but also some of their hopes that the confirmation process can proceed normally, with proper vetting and background checks that could potentially disqualify problematic nominees earlier. Gaetz withdrew after meeting with senators on Wednesday. Sen. Thom Tillis said Gaetz was “in a pressure cooker” when he decided to withdraw, but suggested that it would have little bearing on Trump’s other nominees. “Transactions — one at a time,” he said. As the Hegseth nomination proceeds, Republicans also appear to be betting that they won't face much backlash for publicly setting aside the allegations of sexual misconduct — especially after Trump won election after being found liable for sexual abuse last year. Hegseth held a round of private meetings alongside incoming Vice President JD Vance on Thursday in an attempt to shore up support and told reporters afterward: “The matter was fully investigated and I was completely cleared, and that’s where I’m gonna leave it.” A 22-page police report report made public late Wednesday offered the first detailed account of the allegations against him. A woman told police that she was sexually assaulted in 2017 by Hegseth after he took her phone, blocked the door to a California hotel room and refused to let her leave. The report cited police interviews with the alleged victim, a nurse who treated her, a hotel staffer, another woman at the event and Hegseth. Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Palatore, said the incident was “fully investigated and police found the allegations to be false.” Hegseth paid the woman in 2023 as part of a confidential settlement to head off the threat of what he described as a baseless lawsuit, Palatore has said. Wicker played down the allegations against Hegseth, a former Fox News host, saying that “since no charges were brought from the authorities, we only have press reports.” Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., said after his meeting with Hegseth that he "shared with him the fact that I was saddened by the attacks that are coming his way.” Hagerty dismissed the allegations as “a he-said, she-said thing” and called it a “shame” that they were being raised at all. The senator said attention should instead be focused on the Defense Department that Hegseth would head. It's one of the most complex parts of the federal government with more than 3 million employees, including military service members and civilians. Sexual assault has been a persistent problem in the military, though Pentagon officials have been cautiously optimistic they are seeing a decline in reported sexual assaults among active-duty service members and the military academies. Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, who will be the No. 2 Republican in the Senate next year, said after his meeting with Hegseth that the nominee is a strong candidate who “pledged that the Pentagon will focus on strength and hard power – not the current administration’s woke political agenda.” Senate Republicans are under pressure to hold hearings once they take office in January and confirm nominees as soon as Trump is inaugurated, despite questions about whether Trump’s choices will be properly screened or if some, like Hegseth, have enough experience for the job. Senate Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed, who will be the top Democrat on the panel next year, said the reports on Hegseth “emphasized the need for a thorough investigation by the FBI on the background of all the nominees.” It takes a simple majority to approve Cabinet nominations, meaning that if Democrats all opposed a nominee, four Republican senators would also have to defect for any Trump choice to be defeated. Trump has made clear he’s willing to put maximum pressure on Senate Republicans to give him the nominees he wants – even suggesting at one point that they allow him to just appoint his nominees with no Senate votes. But senators insist, for now, that they are not giving up their constitutional power to have a say. “The president has the right to make the nominations that he sees fit, but the Senate also has a responsibility for advice and consent,” said Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota. In the case of Gaetz, he said, “I think there was advice offered rather than consent.” Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox!Elon Musk’s preschool is the next step in his anti-woke education dreams