Some of My Best Friends Are Black (33 page)

In the sixties, civil rights groups had demanded that Madison Avenue abandon its grotesque stereotypes of black America and create integrated,
racially neutral advertisements. In the era of Black Power and black pride, black leaders and agencies now reversed course. They insisted on consumer messaging that spoke to blacks
as
blacks, in a visual and verbal language that only black agencies could understand and translate to the market. “Targeting for the black consumer is an anthropological consideration more than a marketing consideration,” asserted Thomas Burrell, of Chicago’s Burrell Communications. Vince Cullers, head of another black Chicago agency, developed a whole school of principles he called “soul marketing,” complete with fully articulated instructions on how to use the terms “boss” and “jive.”

In Washington, black leaders took affirmative action mandates and used them to secure black ownership of broadcast licenses for radio and television. On Madison Avenue, black agencies asserted their right to control the ad dollars that flowed to those outlets and the way blacks were portrayed on the airwaves, and affirmative action laws now mandated that some percentage of accounts be subcontracted their way. The pages of
Ebony
and
Jet
came alive with ads that declared “Black Is Beautiful.” Swahili slogans pitched Afro Sheen shampoos to a fast-growing population of urban consumers. Black fathers shared tender moments with their sons and families. These were positive images that black America had never seen of itself in the national popular media. Where blackness had long been something to be ashamed of, now it could be aspirational, too.

“There was so little awareness of blacks as people,” Byron Lewis says. “
Ebony
gave a view of successful people like Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte. But we had no other national media that would give the African-American consumer a feeling of what we could accomplish in this society. I felt that anything that we did that would ultimately project a positive image of blacks would be a good thing. That little commercial we were able to do, given what was out there, helped give a lot of people hope that they could do things. And that’s what I think we accomplished with UniWorld.”

Undertaken with this noble intent, black advertising would still prove a difficult niche to work. Not every product we buy has a cultural component to it. In fact, a lot of them don’t. An AC Delco car battery is an AC
Delco car battery. “Does it start my car?” is all people really want to know; there’s only so much racial spin you can put on that. But if UniWorld wanted to get the AC Delco account, the first question it faced from the client wasn’t “Why is this the best ad for our product?” but rather “What’s black about it?” Everything had to be racialized, on some level, to justify winning the business—otherwise, why not simply go to a general-market agency?

The need to “blacken up” black advertising left black agencies trafficking in stereotypes of their own. Black America’s cultural heritage is infinitely rich and varied; it ranges from the Afro-Caribbean music of New Orleans’s Congo Square to the frontier stoicism of Wyoming’s Buffalo Soldiers. But most of that got lost, dwarfed by fun-house caricatures of Black Power. In the late 1960s, studies showed that blacks smoked menthol cigarettes at a slightly higher average than whites, just enough that tobacco companies saw a market niche to exploit. The Lorillard Tobacco Company hired soul-marketing pioneer Vince Cullers to handle its Newport Menthols account. Cullers took the brand and made it synonymous with Black Power. The print ads featured a stern, bearded black man with a righteous Afro in a bright blue dashiki, proudly introducing “
BOLD, COLD NEWPORT… A WHOLE NEW BAG OF MENTHOL SMOKING
.” Newport’s radio ads were broadcast “live” from Black Power rallies, calling on young black men to be “the boldest brothers in the country” by lighting up a menthol.

The Brother in the Blue Dashiki was a hit—the Marlboro Man of Black Pride—and a textbook example of the power of aspirational advertising. Show people the world they want to live in, and let the product take them there. Soon, Kools and Merits were on the black bandwagon as well. Today, 75 percent of black smokers smoke menthols, as opposed to 23 percent of white smokers, and that’s something all of us just “know.” Same as we “know” that white people drive Volkswagens and drink chardonnay while wearing Dockers at our James Taylor concerts. The things we buy and the brands we use are just another way for us to project our preconceptions onto one another.

That type of bias had always existed, but instead of fighting it the black agencies embraced it, made it their raison d’être. After years of
telling mainstream agencies that they had to market to black America, black agencies were now saying that mainstream agencies
couldn’t
market to black America; only black agencies were qualified to do that. And in making their stand as experts on black culture, the black agencies only further cemented the institutional bias that had kept them out of the industry in the first place: if only black people can sell to black people, then surely only white people can sell to white people—and white people were the lion’s share of the market. You take Boardwalk and Park Place; we’ll keep Baltic and Mediterranean.

“What’s the phrase?” Roy Eaton says. “‘Hoist with their own petard?’ The black agencies bought into the separation out of survival, but I resisted it. I could see its inequity.” Still working at Benton & Bowles, Eaton watched as the best and brightest blacks in advertising left to stake their claim across the street, marginalizing themselves the moment they stepped out the door. If black agencies wanted “black” accounts, with few exceptions, that’s what they’d get. When white executives leave companies, they generally take their big clients with them. Happens all the time. At McCann, Frank Mingo had overseen one of the biggest national product launches of the decade with Miller Lite; that should have given him the reputation to write his own ticket. But when he left to go on his own, he was offered only the black portion of Miller’s business. The client’s relationship wasn’t with the black guy. It was with McCann, and that’s where it stayed.

Worsening matters was the fact that the black accounts seldom stood on their own; they were subcontracted from the general-market agencies. Madison Avenue was still setting the overall creative message for the brands, and black agencies were left to adapt those general campaigns for black audiences. Rarely were they given the chance to do innovative, trendsetting work on their own. And even the work they got, they got under duress. Clients and general-market agencies didn’t necessarily contract with black agencies because they wanted to, but because they had to. “They didn’t really believe that there was critical mass in the African-American market,” Byron Lewis says. “They thought that we were all poor, that we couldn’t purchase national brands. And there was a total absence of minorities in the corporations and advertising agencies
who could influence minority marketing decisions. If they did anything at all, they did it grudgingly.”

Either general-market agencies didn’t see the value in black consumers, and so didn’t want to subcontract the work out, or they
did
see the value in black consumers, and so didn’t want to subcontract the work out. Why not tap that market themselves? In 1972, Y&R tried to start an ethnic marketing division. The Group for Advertising Progress lobbied and had it shut down; Y&R was unfairly trying to muscle black agencies out of their rightful place. The law had redrawn the color line on Madison Avenue, dictating that black stuff was supposed to go here and white stuff was supposed to go there. But that line had to be constantly policed to ensure that the black stuff was going where it was supposed to go, a state of affairs that greatly enhanced the stature of Reverend Jesse Jackson.

By the early 1970s, Jackson had eclipsed the old civil rights establishment with his own black empowerment coalition, Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity). His success in imposing black demands on local Chicago grocery stores had since evolved into a multimillion-dollar enterprise rooted in policing the racial politics of corporate America. Companies involved in disputes—or fearful of becoming involved in one—began paying out settlements that were measured in commitments to minority hiring, subcontracting, and franchising.

Jackson’s negotiations would always result in what he called a “covenant,” in which the company would acknowledge its racial sins and outline its concessions. Through Operation PUSH, Ford Motors coughed up more than two hundred minority-owned dealerships. General Foods put $20 million into policies with black-owned insurance companies. Among companies that sold consumer goods, Jackson’s settlements almost always included provisions for media buys to be made through black ad agencies. Avon cosmetics took its black account to UniWorld in 1975. Kentucky Fried Chicken’s black account went to Mingo-Jones. In perhaps the biggest coup of all, Jackson negotiated for Burrell Communications to be named the agency of record for all of Coca-Cola’s black accounts worldwide, including Africa, a piece of business worth over $7 million a year. Companies that didn’t get a visit from Reverend Jackson didn’t wait for one. They went into the minority-supplier business as a preemptive
PR move. Among themselves, the black agencies groused about the condescending nature of these transactions. They referred to the accounts as “get off my back” money. But they took it. They had to.

That was the catch-22 for the aspiring black businessperson in the 1970s. Byron Lewis offered a genuine service, real insight into a market that Madison Avenue was missing. In their bias, the white guys wouldn’t take him seriously as an equal. Was there any way to overcome that bias short of government coercion and public shaming? In the short term, probably not. But if affirmative action and “get off my back” money helped make black agencies viable, the politics of it also stunted their growth. For the most part, Madison Avenue’s racial transactions took place across a tenuous network of coerced, condescending, adversarial relationships—and that’s no way to run a relationship business. As one black executive noted at the time, “On a long-range basis, you can’t build a business model on white man’s guilt.”

Proponents of black self-determination loved to speak of black America’s tremendous potential. If it were a separate country, they said, it would be the twenty-sixth largest in the world, have the fifteenth highest per capita income in the world, and a gross domestic product the size of Canada’s. But black America was not a separate country. Though 11 percent of the total population in 1969, blacks earned only 6.5 percent of total personal income, represented 0.7 percent of the country’s total wealth, and held 0.14 percent of the nation’s stock market investments. Relative to America as a whole, one prominent black economist pointed out, those numbers were “distressingly feeble.” Romantic ideas about black capitalism were “dangerous nonsense,” and to encourage them was “to perpetuate a cruel hoax” on the black community.

Affirmative action was sold as a mechanism to lift black America up and in, but the people who sold it knew it was anything but. Within a few weeks of calling the Philadelphia Plan “historic and critical” in Congress, Nixon jotted a note to a domestic aide calling the program “an almost hopeless holding action at best” and saying, “Let’s limit our public action and $—to the least we can get away with.”

The goals and timetables of the Philadelphia Plan proved that quotas
can create jobs, but they also proved that once you turn race into a numbers game, you’re inviting people to game the numbers. Labor unions produced paper compliance through practices known as “motorcycling” (moving a handful of blacks from one site to another to meet the quota on each site) and “checkerboarding” (putting all the black guys on the one government-financed project and ignoring the issue elsewhere). By 1973, all the “Philadelphia Plans” implemented in cities nationwide had produced only 3,243 jobs.

Black capitalism also produced mixed results. Only five days after signing the executive order to create the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, Nixon sent a memo to the head of the initiative, observing that the average small business has a 75 percent chance of failing, but that “minority small business has a 90 percent chance of failing—good luck!” Affirmative action for minority-owned business did create a number of successful, wealthy black entrepreneurs, but it also became a way for companies to subcontract their racial problems out the door. Back in Kansas City, the black-owned Buick dealership on Troost Avenue serves as a perfect example. Forced to hand over minority dealerships and franchises, companies gave black owners the downtown locations and transferred white owners out to the newer, more profitable suburban branches. Ten years later, the guy on Troost was out of business.

The immediate dividends paid by affirmative action were sorely needed; realistically speaking, there was no more direct way to transfer that much money into that many black wallets that quickly. In that sense, affirmative action produced results and was necessary. Black America was long overdue for satisfaction. But Nixon wasn’t selling satisfaction. He was selling instant gratification—that’s what a good ad man does. Many people in Nixon’s camp had genuine faith in affirmative action. It wasn’t
designed
to fail, but it wasn’t exactly designed to succeed, either; the intent behind it was not rooted in a desire to help black people attain equal standing in society. It was riot insurance. It was to provide a financial incentive for blacks to stay in their own communities and out of the suburbs. It was also a way to dilute the strain on the corporate human resources department. With the majority of college-educated blacks working for the government and with the brightest entrepreneurial talents
siphoned off into black-owned business, there were fewer white-collar black hires left for the Fortune 500 to deal with. Affirmative action in government hiring and subcontracting ensured that the corporate glass ceiling would rarely be challenged. Unsurprisingly, the earliest supporters of affirmative action were the corporate- and suburban-friendly Republicans. The
Wall Street Journal
called black capitalism “promising.” In Congress, the Republican Policy Committee backed it, too.
*
Preferences and quotas were an easy answer; they took racial justice and turned it into a line item, an annual allotment for good PR. It was a minor cost, easily absorbed. And as long as the riots didn’t come back, it was money well spent. All corporate CEOs had to do to meet their minimal affirmative action mandates was hire a few tokens for the social responsibility department and delegate some work to the minority franchise across town. Then you paid your annual tithe to Jesse Jackson and you were out of it.