Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  “We think the advertising industry is laughing at black people,” says the NAACP’s interim general counsel, Angela Ciccolo. “I think they’re laughing because it goes back to ‘We’re special and this is a special club and we’re so talented and smart and we’re entitled to this lifestyle.’ It’s great that people have friends and connections, but when you have public companies, you have laws that are designed to protect people and give people opportunity, and they should be obeyed. Men in particular have preserved their social standing and economic status by perpetuating networks. ‘We’re gonna bring in who we want to bring in and goddamn anybody else who wants to challenge that.’ The whole industry is like they’ve never heard of the EEOC or equal opportunity. It may turn out that they have to be sued. Sometimes, that’s the only way you can get someone to listen.”

  By 2008, my last year in advertising, I was mostly freelancing part-time, but I’d spent close to nine years working on and off at a total of five different agencies, all of it during a time of mounting legal and public pressure to hire minorities. Yet I can count the number of black people I worked with on one hand—not including the ones who emptied the wastebaskets or installed the telephones.

  Moving from full-time to freelance and back again, from one agency to the next, I never had to sit for a single performance evaluation or go on a single job interview save the first one. I never had to produce a résumé, a portfolio, or fill out any sort of application. I just kept getting work because I knew the people doing the hiring because they’d known the people who’d hired them; just a few years in and some of us were already management. All that time I had one foot out the door because what I really wanted was to “be a writer.” Yet by the end of my run, I’d tripled my pay rate, was using a window office overlooking the Hudson River, and had been offered a managerial slot that came with a very decent low-six-figure salary. My cubicle-mate? The guy with the degree in furniture design? He was running the department. He’s the guy who offered me the job.

  I’ve since been told—by those who defend Madison Avenue’s hiring practices—that my experience in the industry was some sort of anomaly, that you’re not supposed to be able to skate through the system and get as far as I did the way that I did. Maybe. But I’m pretty sure I’m not that clever, and I know I’m not that charming. The truth is that a bunch of kids out of college happened to be in the right place at the right time and the world started dumping money in our laps.

  Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good summary of how the entire modern advertising industry was born. After World War II, a bunch of white guys in New York happened to be in the right place at the right time the last time the next big thing came along. And, no, it wasn’t television. Madison Avenue became what it is today—incredibly lucrative and permanently divided—thanks to the federally subsidized, racially restricted suburb.

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  Mad Black Men

  In the early 1950s, BBDO hired Clarence Holte, the first black man ever to hold a professional position at a major ad agency. But Holte was hired solely to cover the Negro market, handling accounts that bought media in black newspapers and on black radio. It was a niche position, as few advertisers were genuinely interested in marketing to black consumers to begin with; they were too poor to merit attention, companies felt. At the time, most every black person who worked in sales and media was relegated to a position like Holte’s. It was assumed that the Negro market would forever stay the Negro market, and that niche was the only place blacks were qualified to work. No black person could get hired to write or manage general-market (i.e., white) advertising, because what black person would possibly know how to talk to all those white suburban housewives?

  Television changed the way we communicate, but it was suburbia that drove the demand for the advertising that paid for what was on television. To make money for J. C. Nichols, the Federal Housing Authority had sent the Greatest Generation out to live in a bunch of empty houses in the middle of nowhere, and now all those empty houses had to be filled up with stuff. New dishwashers. New carpet cleaners. New lawn furniture. New everything. In the 1950s, the total dollars spent on advertising grew by 75 percent, rising faster than average household income and faster than the gross national product.

  We all know that advertising is a big con to get us to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need. It works on us anyway. Ads work because they’re aspirational. They tap into some unsatisfied desire and then sell you the solution for it. Buy this product, take it home, and you’ll be safer, happier, and more attractive. And therein lay the root of the industry’s problem with race, both in the office and on the airwaves. If advertising is aspirational, who in the 1950s aspired to be black? No one, as far as major corporations were concerned. The big money was in selling suburbia, and the appeal of suburbia was rooted in its racial and social exclusivity. Maytag wasn’t going to sell washing machines to Susie Homemaker by showing a prosperous black family moving in with one next door. Blacks played only one role in white America: they were the help. And that was the only role they played in advertising as well. Aunt Jemima stopped by at breakfast to serve pancakes, but otherwise black America was kept well out of sight.

  For much of the twentieth century, it was even a novel idea that black people should aspire to be black. Black newspapers and radio stations were filled with ads for skin bleachers and hair straighteners. Relative to their income, blacks overspent on fine clothes and Cadillacs, buying the markers of white status to compensate for the daily insults to their own. But with the civil rights movement gaining steam, blacks were becoming an increasingly self-assertive and self-respecting demographic; the postwar economic boom had given them more disposable income than ever before. Companies began to realize there was profit in getting a share of black dollars, which meant that advertisers had to be able to talk to black consumers without talking down to them. That opened up jobs for people like Clarence Holte to serve the Negro market. But the color line on Madison Avenue was impermeable. So impermeable that it was broken only by a man who wandered across it by accident.

  Roy Eaton grew up in the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem, the son of Jamaican immigrants, a domestic worker and a mechanic. Despite losing part of one of his right fingers in a childhood accident, Roy wanted to learn to play piano. He first sat down at the keys when he was six years old. Nine months later he played Carnegie Hall—a prodigy. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from City College of New York while earning a dual degree from the Manhattan School of Music, he was awarded a scholarship to study classical piano at the University of Zurich. After study in Europe, he later returned to the states to make concert debuts at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and at New York’s Town Hall.

  Eaton’s musical career stalled, however, when the army drafted him to serve in Korea. After his tour overseas, he returned to Manhattan and struggled to find work. While searching for a teaching job in academia, he also looked into broadcasting; many of the radio and television programs of the era used live musical accompaniment. One of Eaton’s favorites was Goodyear Playhouse, but all he knew about the show was that a company called Young & Rubicam was involved in its production. He didn’t know what Young & Rubicam was. “Ignorance,” Eaton says, led him to Madison Avenue.

  “I was visiting an employment agency on Forty-second Street. I walked into the telephone booth, looked at the phone book, and realized that Y&R was only two blocks away from where I was. It was a hot day in July. I just walked into the agency, walked up to personnel, and told them that I’d like to see the director. They took my résumé—it was a slow day, nothing was happening—and when the personnel manager saw all my academic and music credentials, he was very curious as to why I was there. He came out and said, ‘How can I help you?’ Which, by the way, is code for ‘What’s that black doing in here?’

  “I said, ‘I know you do Goodyear Playhouse, and I was wondering if there might be an opening for someone to work in that area.’
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  “He said, ‘We don’t actually produce Goodyear Playhouse. Goodyear is the sponsor. We do advertising, but you wouldn’t be interested in that.’

  “‘Well, I wouldn’t know if I was interested in anything unless I tried it,’ I said.

  “‘Okay. Go home and write some ads, and I’ll submit them.’

  “He figured that would probably get rid of me. But I went home and looked at ads in Life magazine and over that weekend I wrote ten commercials; I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to do that many. One of the commercials I wrote used a concept that was already in production at Y&R. I wrote it for Hunt’s tomato paste. You’re in Italy, close up on the food, pull back, and you’re in America. The idea being to get Italian flavor in America. The creative director, Charlie Feldman, called me in for an interview. He was Jewish, had broken that barrier himself several years before. So he was interested in me. When I first interviewed, he said, ‘If you were white, you’d be at the desk right now. But you’re not, and I want a Jackie Robinson.’”

  As it happened, Charlie Feldman was a classically trained musician himself. He asked Eaton to compose a few sample songs, commercial jingles. Eaton went home and cranked out seven of them. The next day he became the first black man ever hired to write advertising for white people in America. He quickly mastered the lowbrow art form. His tunes for Texaco (“Trust your car… to the man who wears the star…”) and Chef Boyardee (“We’re having Beefaroni… it’s beef and macaroni…“) would soon become woven into the country’s cultural fabric. For Kent cigarettes, he composed a jingle that incorporated the Bebop Jazz sounds recently pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Without anyone knowing, Eaton had slipped the avant-garde of black music right into white America’s living room. The Kent tune became a hit single, garnering a ton of radio play on its own. The very happy client upped its billings with Y&R by over a million dollars a year. Eaton’s annual salary was $8,000. “They got a bargain,” he laughs.

  Yet Eaton’s salary was on par with, even slightly higher than, his white colleagues because of his musical expertise. “People with no experience usually started at six,” he says. “It was very fair. Once I was in, it was strictly about the work. With the exception of a few people who just hated blacks—and I knew who they were—I had no difficulties at all. People respected my talent, needed my talent, and that was it. Among my peers I made friendships that are lasting even to this day.” Charlie Feldman and Eaton would often play chamber music together. In 1957, a car accident in Utah left Eaton in a coma and killed his young wife. Being a black man, alone, in a coma, in Utah, Eaton was certainly not in line to get the best medical services the hospital had to offer. But Charlie Feldman flew out, made sure his friend received every treatment possible, and stayed for his entire recovery. When the hospital bill came, Eaton’s colleagues all stepped in, pooled money, and picked up the tab.

  Eaton was treated well on Madison Avenue. In 1960, the young black composer was even lured away from Y&R by Benton & Bowles, which promoted him to vice president and music director. But Roy Eaton was the Jackie Robinson who wasn’t. He’d only slipped around the color line. It was still firmly in place, and black America was still locked out of the major leagues.

  In April of 1963, just as the Children’s Crusade was laying siege to the segregated department stores of downtown Birmingham, America’s three largest civil rights groups, the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), had all converged on New York in an attempt to break through the color line on Madison Avenue. At the time, after nearly two decades of sustained postwar economic growth, 55 percent of blacks in America lived below the poverty line, blacks made fifty-three cents to every dollar that whites made, and over 10 percent of blacks were unemployed, nearly double the rate for the general population. A path into the American workplace had to be found.

  On April 22, 1963, Advertising Age released the results of a three-year study done by the Urban League on employment practices at the ten largest ad agencies in New York City. It showed that out of some twenty thousand employees, only twenty-five blacks held positions in any kind of creative or managerial capacity. Of those twenty-five, like Clarence Holte at BBDO, many were consigned to work exclusively on the Negro market, which the Urban League denounced as a form of “internal segregation.”

  Finally called to account for their years of discrimination, advertising executives tried to fend off protests, trotting out one excuse after the next. It was the clients, agencies said, who didn’t want blacks in their ads or associated with their products. Moreover, there simply weren’t any black applicants out there to choose from. This was not entirely false. In the early 1960s, the best minds of the civil rights generation weren’t going into business; they were going into law, politics, government, and teaching, professions that they saw as part of the freedom struggle. And of those blacks who were blazing trails in corporate America, few even considered advertising—its reputation for discrimination was just that bad. Ad agencies didn’t hire black people because black people didn’t apply to ad agencies because ad agencies didn’t hire black people.

  And advertising already had too many white people. Despite its ubiquitous presence in our lives, advertising is a small industry. In 1962, the six biggest agencies received some twenty-three thousand applications, four times as many candidates as they had employees, let alone job openings; there just weren’t a whole lot of vacancies to fill. To give every ad agency proportional black representation top to bottom in 1963 would have required just a few hundred jobs total. But what the agencies didn’t get, at first, was that this wasn’t only about jobs. It was a fight to control the cultural narrative of the country.

  Advertising distorts and amplifies culture. It’s a fun-house mirror. It takes ideas and images out of our real lives, exaggerates them for comic or dramatic effect, and then reflects them back to us. Susie Homemaker and Aunt Jemima—the perfect housewife and the loyal help—were part of the same distorted depiction of aspirational upper-middle-class status. Both were cartoons, and both needed to go if America was going to get its head right. Civil rights leaders wanted advertising to show that all consumers were created equal. They wanted Madison Avenue to buy the world a Coke and teach it how to sing. The boys on Madison Avenue had no idea what they were talking about.

  Most of corporate America was white in those days, certainly, but advertising was white on a whole different level, so white that there were shades of white in its whiteness. The industry was tribal, incestuous. It was territory you couldn’t hope to navigate if you weren’t already a member. The biggest agencies, like J. Walter Thompson, McCann-Erickson, and Young & Rubicam, were filled with the scions of the WASPy East Coast establishment. Certain Ivy League grads gathered here, others gathered there. The Irish Catholics had carved out a niche at BBDO. Jews worked at Grey. If there was an outlier, it was the young, scrappy DDB—Doyle Dane Bernbach, Irish and Jewish with a few Italians starting to filter in to the creative ranks.

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1963, activists laid siege to Madison Avenue with picket marches and demonstrations. By August, agency executives had agreed to sit down for talks with the NAACP. And in November, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins was invited to give the keynote at that year’s annual conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4A’s), the industry’s largest trade organization. At the convention, Wilkins gave a stirring speech on the damage done by advertising’s depictions of, and discrimination against, black Americans. Following his address, Madison Avenue promised to take action.

  They took out an ad.

  On November 11, 1963, the 4A’s took out a full-page in the New York Times, sending out “AN INVITATION TO ALL BRIGHT YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN TO CONSIDER ADVERTISING AS A CAREER.” Hovering above the headline was an illustration now familiar to modern readers: a group of eager young professionals, with a black man and woman in the mix, looking bright-eyed and professional, just like the white folks.
“Diversity advertising” was born.

  It was as useless then as it is now. Voluntary measures and “We’ll do better” pledges were used by the industry to stave off pressure from civil rights groups, but it mostly amounted to stonewalling and tokenism. Madison Avenue’s foot-dragging was egregious enough to trigger an investigation by the New York City Commission on Human Rights. Another survey of minority employment in advertising was done. As of August of 1967, out of close to 18,000 employees at several dozen agencies, the commission counted only 635 blacks, most all of them working in the back office or at the clerical or mail room level. Only fifteen were working in any kind of creative, client-facing capacity. Even more damning, close to 40 percent of those black hires were housed in a handful of agencies, the few who had made a sincere effort, which showed that the rest of them weren’t trying at all.

  Despite its dim outlook, the NYCCHR report did highlight one important fact: companies that wanted to change, could. Benton & Bowles, where Roy Eaton was now music director, led the industry with 8.5 percent black employment overall.* The award for most-improved went to J. Walter Thompson. In four years, JWT’s New York office had gone from 0.6 percent black to 4.9 percent black. At the behest of the agency’s chairman, JWT had made a sincere, forward-leaning effort. Partnering with civil rights groups, they went out and found the black candidates who couldn’t be found. They recruited from black colleges and publicized job openings in black media. A special training program was created to groom clerical hires for professional positions. Management made a decision, and it got done.

  Black employees were also encouraged to recruit and recommend any qualified candidates they might know personally. Bring your friends. If you can’t beat the old boys’ network, start making one.