The Friday after Thanksgiving, now the biggest shopping day in America, with a name everyone explains wrong.
Documented
The police logs
The earliest known use is 1951, factory slang for workers calling in sick the day after Thanksgiving. By 1961 Philadelphia police used Black Friday for the traffic-and-shopper chaos they dreaded. In 1994 the Philadelphia Inquirer's Joseph P. Barrett recounted how he helped popularize the term. The in-the-black accounting explanation first appears only in 1981.
Assessment: Documented: newspaper archives and Barrett's own account give the name a police-blotter birthday.
Stories
The accounting glow-up
Facing an ugly name, merchants and PR people spread the version where shops finally turn a yearly profit, moving from red ink to black. It worked so well that most dictionaries now list it as a second, folk etymology.
Assessment: Stories: a deliberate rebrand, dated decades after the name existed.
Interesting claims
The slave-auction myth
A viral claim says the name comes from slave traders selling people at discount after Thanksgiving. Snopes traced it and found no evidence at all; it is a 21st-century internet invention. A much older Black Friday, 1869, was a gold-market crash, which shows the name gets recycled whenever money goes wrong.
Assessment: Interesting claims: false, and its spread says more about now than about 1951.
Sources and further reading
Joseph P. Barrett, Philadelphia Inquirer (1994), his account of popularizing the police term Black Friday
Bonnie Taylor-Blake's archival find: 'This Friday Was Black with Traffic', Philadelphia newsroom usage, 1961
Factory Management and Maintenance journal (1951): earliest known use for post-Thanksgiving worker absences
Snopes fact-check on the slave-auction origin claim: no evidence, 21st-century invention
Philadelphia Inquirer (1981): first appearance of the red-ink-to-black-ink accounting explanation
Worth asking
A slur coined by exhausted police became the retail industry's proudest label; how many other brand stories are old insults with better marketing?