Shopping for America, Or How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love the Pemberton Mall

Abstract

On the evening of December 22, 1874, the white folks of Vicksburg, Mississippi, lined Washington Street to cheer the parade that brought Santa Claus to town. Actually, this was a Santa Klaws parade, organized by a group of merchants and civic leaders known as the Santa Klaws Klan. The Constitution Fire Company Cornet band led the procession, followed by several floats depicting lawyers, bankers, merchants, mechanics, and grangers all fallen on hard times--a lesson in the history of Reconstruction Vicksburg. His Majesty, the Santa Klaws Chief, rode a chariot drawn by four horses, dispensing gifts to the crowd along the way. There could be no mistaking the symbolism here. Santa was bringing what white Vicksburgers wanted most for Christmas--the end of the Carpetbagger regime and the restoration of white supremacy. Only two weeks previous, Vicksburg and surrounding Warren County had been the scene of one of the bloodiest episodes of mob violence in U.S. history, as white Democrats recently restored to power in the city attacked and killed perhaps 300 black Republicans who still held control of several rural neighborhoods. Small wonder shoppers from west central Mississippi and northeastern Louisiana had been avoiding Vicksburg, taking their business instead to Memphis, Natchez, and New Orleans. Now they were being asked to return to spend their money in the shops along Washington Street as freely and easily as they had before General Pemberton surrendered the city to General Grant. "In our own city there has existed a feeling of indifference towards our general prosperity for too long a period." This must end, as it will, opined a newspaper editorial, "if the proper encouragement is given to the Santa Klaws Klan." 1