” I don’t plan on spending a dollar with any business that is not black-owned because while they don’t value black life, we will make them respect our money”, stated Sarah Graham, a Ferguson resident who has been participating in the protests since August.
Another Ferguson resident stated, “Why should we just stop spending on Black Friday? If we really want to make an a difference then we must stop spending until systemic change is made in our community.”
There are some who believe that Black Friday can be traced back to the slavery era when slave traders sold blacks at a discounted price to plantation owners preparing for the winter.
But the first use of the phrase “Black Friday” was not actually used until nearly 100 years after the abolition of slavery in the U.S., according to a fact checking website here. The name originated in 1951 and referred to the mass number of workers calling into work sick, hoping to score a four-day weekend.
A decade later, police in Philadelphia began using the name to describe the overwhelming number of shoppers who would descend on the city the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving. The Army-Navy football game was also held in the City of Brotherly Love that weekend, adding thousands more to the masses. Philadelphia reporters covering those events used the name liberally to describe the busy weekend and from there spread to the rest of the country.
Beyonce sister Solange Knowles-Ferguson has also decided to use her celebrity to in support of the Brown family by postponing the release of her Puma sneaker of “Black Friday as well. She posted the following message to her Instagram page:
