First Black Friday History: Origin Not Slavery, Just Embarrassing American Consumerism And Media Compliance

Every year, the history of Black Friday repeats itself — even the modern addition of memes linking its first origin to slavery.

Americans spend valuable hours of their Thanksgiving Day clicking and flipping through pages of potential savings, then millions wake up before dawn — or before going to sleep on Thanksgiving night — to crowd outside WalMart, Macy’s, and Best Buy locations around the country.

Then comes the part of this Black Friday history that we’ve become known for globally: the greed. Grown adults fight over tablets and table runners. People get trampled. Civilization implodes on itself, just 24 hours after we’ve come together to celebrate the triumph of Westernization: inviting the “savages” over for that first Thanksgiving dinner.

The same media that enticed those people into being there in the first place then gawks at their rabid Black Friday behavior. Compilations are made. Think pieces are written, and it all starts again 365 days later.

So, how did this day of contemporary barbarity first come to be? Well, one popular theory for Black Friday’s history that circulates every year is that it originates from the promotional selling off of slaves as the harvest season ended; but that theory isn’t backed up by any documentary evidence despite being a popular source of viral meme fodder. Furthermore, it doesn’t make a lot of logical sense — human beings are not milk or an old model of the iPhone. Value would be unlikely to diminish much between seasons, and feeding those slaves until the next year would offset any savings passed on to the buyer.

Black Slavery Friday. Celebrating a crime. Imagine Jews celebrating the day of the Holocaust. We need to liberate our minds. #blackfriday pic.twitter.com/SqqMymbt22

— Isaac Mangena (@Ice_Izo) November 24, 2016

Yet another form of human slavery does offer some explanation of the origin of the term: materialism. Aside from the day-after-Thanksgiving shopping rush, Black Friday was used to describe when the stock market registered a particularly precipitous fall. One of the first documented instances of this was 24 September 1869 when the U.S. government flooded the market with gold after two speculators attempted to corner the market, causing stocks to plummet.

But that version has little to do with the origin of what we know as Black Friday today. The term seems to have been first used in conjunction with the Thanksgiving weekend in the 1950s, but, again, not in relation to the consumer-driven holiday. Rather, Black Friday was what employers referred to as the day when waves of employees would call in sick to try to bridge their way to a four-day weekend. One prime example of this use commonly cited by linguists is from a publication called Factory Management and Maintenance.

“‘Friday-after-Thanksgiving-itis’ is a disease second only to the bubonic plague in its effects. At least that’s the feeling of those who have to get production out, when the ‘Black Friday’ comes along. The shop may be half empty, but every absentee was sick — and can prove it.”

America exemplifies this. Black Friday leads to violence and disorder but it’s all good. Black Lives Matter is painted as civil disobedience pic.twitter.com/l6U57LzLXv

— Niko(s)lai(y) (@Nikolai_LEB) November 24, 2016

It’s likely that these two previous uses, while seemingly unrelated, are what eventually moved it into the common lexicon. Most historians agree that the Philadelphia police force was the first to derisively refer to the rush of shoppers they had to deal with on the day after Thanksgiving as the “Black Friday” crowd. An article from 1961 in Public Relations News notes how companies tried to disassociate themselves from the pejorative term, instead choosing “Big Friday.” Also noted here, the media was complicit in asserting this viewpoint, something many would argue still continues today.

“For downtown merchants throughout the nation, the biggest shopping days normally are the two following Thanksgiving Day. Resulting traffic jams are an irksome problem to the police and, in Philadelphia, it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday. Hardly a stimulus for good business… [industry heads] recommended adoption of a positive approach which would convert Black Friday and Black Saturday to Big Friday and Big Saturday. The media cooperated in spreading the news of the beauty of Christmas-decorated downtown Philadelphia, the popularity of a ‘family-day outing’ to the department stores during the Thanksgiving weekend, the increased parking facilities, and the use of additional police officers for guaranteeing a free flow of traffic.”

Despite the negative Black Friday history, the term has extended its reach around the globe. Canadians who made the trip across the border to take advantage of the sales are now being persuaded to stay home by their own retailers’ deals. Mexico now hosts its own version during November, thought it’s tailored to the celebration of the Mexican Revolution instead of Thanksgiving. India, quickly becoming one of the world’s consumer capitals, has also seized on the idea, joining several other countries that tap into the U.S. market digitally.

How lucky are we that in addition to Kim Kardashian, we can globalize the first Black Friday history around the world. While its origins may not stem from slavery, the term does seem an eerily accurate descriptor for the mad rush that is about to flood our screens.

[Featured Image by Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images]