Some holidays, like Thanksgiving, have straightforward names. Others do not — for example Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving that marks the start of holiday shopping season for many Americans. Although Black Friday is not a federal holiday, many Americans have or take it off from work, and the day has its own specific tradition in the form of sweeping retail sales.
How did this shopping holiday get its name — or at least the "Black" part of it?
History of the Term
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which has an extensive entry on the term, English speakers have attached the adjective "black" to the name of a day of the week to "denote a specific past date associated with disaster, defeat, ruin, etc." since the 1570s. The specific term "Black Friday" first appeared in print in 1610; schoolchildren used the phrase to refer to any Friday on which exams took place.
Starting in the 1860s, the term took on an economic connotation when stockbrokers and journalists applied the term to two notorious financial panics, one in the U.K. in 1866 and one in the U.S. in 1869.
It's not clear exactly when Americans began to use the phrase to denote the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, which takes place on the fourth Thursday of November. However, as multiple researchers and reporters have noted in their own investigations into the history of the term, the earliest known published appearance of the phrase to describe that day was in an article in a November 1951 issue of "Factory Management and Maintenance," an industrial trade magazine.
That article, titled "Tips to Good Human Relations for Factory Executives," contained a section titled "What to Do About 'Friday-After-Thanksgiving'" that began:
"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.
This article included no mention of holiday shopping — it simply acknowledged that factory workers who were scheduled to work the day after Thanksgiving frequently called in sick, leaving factories short-staffed. In other words, the article's author used the term "Black Friday" in the same way English speakers had been using it for centuries already: to refer to an especially bad day.
The earliest evidence for the term being used as shorthand for an exceptionally busy shopping day marking the start of the holiday-season rush came around a decade later. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, two competing origin stories emerged to explain the term's modern development.
According to one story, Philadelphia police and/or retail employees coined the term to describe what was, for them, a reliably frustrating workday. According to the other story, credit for the name goes to shop owners and bookkeepers, who chose it because on that day entries in their account ledgers went from red, signifying debt or losses, to black, signifying profit.
In the 2010s, a third explanation for the name that gained traction on social media claimed the name "Black Friday" reflected the discounted auctions of Black slaves that, before the abolition of slavery in the U.S., were allegedly held on that day. As we found when we investigated this claim in 2013, it is not supported by any concrete proof and makes little sense in historical context.
Below, we've collected the evidence for — and against — the three common explanations for Black Friday's name.
Philadelphia Police, Taxi Drivers, and Retail Employees
As multiple writers who have investigated the history of Black Friday have noted, the available evidence suggests that the association of the day after Thanksgiving with holiday shopping began in and around Philadelphia in the 1950s.
At first, residents of eastern Pennsylvania referred to the resulting surge in sales and traffic as "Big Friday" — at least in print, as multiple newspaper articles from the 1950s attest. According to a 1960 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the annual shopping boom resulted, at least in part, from that newspaper's annual tradition of running local retailers' first holiday ads of the season on Thanksgiving Day.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-philadelphia-inquirer/158986966/
Article from Nov 25, 1960 The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Over the following years and decades, Philadelphians who had jobs that required them to interact with the onslaught of shoppers — specifically, retail workers, taxi and bus drivers, and police officers — came up with another, less cheerful term, according to newspaper reports of the era. That term was "Black Friday."
In a 1970 article, for example, a Philadelphia traffic patrolman told the Philadelphia Inquirer that "policemen and cab drivers" called the day "Black Friday" because it was "supposed to be the worst day for traffic out of the whole year."
Similarly, five years later, The New York Times — in its earliest use of the term "Black Friday" to describe the holiday, according to the newspaper's official X account — credited "Philadelphia police and bus drivers" with inventing the term. That article also noted that out-of-town traffic from fans traveling to see the Army-Navy football game, traditionally held in Philadelphia the Saturday after Thanksgiving, contributed to headaches on the road and around town.
And in 1985, a manager at Wanamaker's, a Philadelphia department store, told a reporter for the Evening Sun (Hanover, Pennsylvania) that his employees called the day "Black Friday" because it was "really a tough day on them … the analogy is to a black cloud hanging over them."
Red to Black
As the term "Black Friday" caught on, journalists and higher-ups in the retail world began to point to a more positive explanation for the term. Interviewed for the same 1970 Philadelphia Inquirer article mentioned above, a Wanamaker's public relations director told the reporter that the "only thing black" about the day was "the color of the ink used to record it in the store ledgers."
The P.R. director was referring to the accounting custom of using black ink to report profits and red ink to report losses or debts. In other words, he meant that Black Friday got its name because it was profitable for companies.
Over the following decades, as Black Friday spread beyond the Philadelphia area, that story came to eclipse the explanation that the day's nickname originated from exasperated police officers and retail workers. In 1980, for example, a reporter for the Times Leader (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) wrote:
Since most businesses do 70 percent of their sales between now and Christmas, this is obviously the time when all the money is made, putting the stores "in the black."
Similarly, in 1989, a reporter for the Press of Atlantic City (New Jersey) wrote that Black Friday "supposedly received its name because it's the day American retailers post a profit, or, in accounting lingo, break into the black, for the year."
The explanation that the name "Black Friday" refers to the day's profits is reasonable on its surface, but as the journalist Kevin Drum concluded when he looked into the history of the bookkeeping explanation in a 2011 blog post, it ultimately holds less water than the explanation that the term originated from frustrated Philadelphia-area police, taxi and bus drivers, and retail employees who had to face the crowds at work that day.
One of several pieces of evidence Drum cited for this conclusion was an email he received from a woman who said she briefly worked at Wanamaker's, the department store, in 1971. In that email, the woman wrote:
The feeling of impending doom sticks with me to this day. The experienced old ladies that had worked there for years called it "Black Friday." I'm quite sure it had nothing to do with store ledgers going from red to black.
Slave Sales
Decades after the first published examples of the term "Black Friday" as shorthand for the annual shopping holiday that falls the day after Thanksgiving, a new alleged explanation of the term's origin emerged on social media, where it circulated largely in meme form starting around 2013. According to this new explanation, the "Black" in "Black Friday" originally referred to Black slaves, who were allegedly sold at a discount nationwide on the day after Thanksgiving.
As we found when we investigated the claim in 2013, there was no historical evidence to support this explanation. In fact, Thanksgiving only became a national holiday in October 1863 — 10 months after Abraham Lincoln ended legal slavery in the U.S.'s remaining slave states by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863.
Furthermore, as we noted above, there is no evidence that the term "Black Friday" was associated with shopping until the middle of the 20th century — around 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Although the slave sale explanation makes little historical sense and has been the subject of multiple independent debunkings beyond our own, it has still continued (archived) to circulate (archived) on social media for more (archived) than a decade (archived).
In one notable example, the singer Toni Braxton posted (archived) the claim in meme form on her Facebook account in November 2014, commenting: "No Black Friday for me...." At the time of this writing, that post had received around 39,000 likes, 408,000 shares, and 19,700 comments.
In summary, the available evidence does not tell us exactly who first called the day after Thanksgiving "Black Friday" — or why. However, newspaper reports from the middle of the 20th century strongly suggest the term first emerged in and around 1950s and 1960s Philadelphia, and specifically among police, cab and bus drivers, and retail employees whose jobs required them to face the hordes of holiday shoppers that filled the city's streets and stores.
These workers may have been playing on "Big Friday," the more neutral name Philadelphia newspapers and stores used for the day after Christmas ads began running in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Either way, their choice of the term "Black Friday" was grounded in centuries of English speakers using it to denote a particularly disastrous or unfortunate day — a likely reason why, by the 1980s, retail higher-ups began to promote their own more positive explanation for the name.