Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  The old boys’ network has proven to be nothing if not resilient. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which outlawed discrimination in companies applying for government contracts during the buildup to World War II. In August of 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10479, which established the Government Contract Committee to oversee the enforcement of Executive Order 8802, since few companies had bothered to pay it much mind. Almost ten years later, in March of 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925, which, again, outlawed discrimination by government contractors based on race, creed, color, or national origin. Kennedy called for “affirmative action” to be taken, not for racial preference, but to ensure that purposeful discrimination would be rooted out.

  It wasn’t. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Title VI of the bill (one more time, for good measure) outlawed discrimination in government contracting. Title VII went one step further and outlawed discrimination among all private employers as well—a bold reach, considering how little the law had done to stop discrimination in government contracting thus far. Title VII also established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a federal agency to enforce all of the above, seeing as how, to date, no one ever had. Then, in September of 1965, Johnson rolled out Executive Order 11246, which outlawed discrimination in government contracts worth more than $10,000 per year, because, somehow, that wasn’t covered when discrimination in all government contracts was outlawed in Executive Orders 8802, 10479, 10925, and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act passed just one year before. Through all this, between 1962 and 1967, in at least twenty-two of America’s fifty states, black employment either remained stagnant or declined.

  Same as it did with demands for fair housing, America responded with the right laws and lots of committees and panels, but the authority vested in those entities was laughable in the larger context of the problem. Like HUD, the EEOC was empowered only to engage in “conference, conciliation, and persuasion” with offending companies, or recommend them to the Justice Department for prosecution. Shortly after its forming, the EEOC was flooded with more than forty-four thousand discrimination complaints. Only nine hundred of them were ever brought to trial.

  In March of 1968, after the results of its investigation into Madison Avenue were published, the NYCCHR dragged all the agency heads back in front of the cameras for several days of hearings. More excuses were given, more promises made. “We’re overreacting to this Negro thing,” one exec was overheard saying to another. “It’ll go away.” Which more or less captured the industry’s attitude toward the whole affair. Why get bent out of shape? The most severe penalty the commission could threaten them with was a five-hundred-dollar fine.

  Two months after the hearings, the NYCCHR filed suit against the two worst-offending agencies to make examples of them, and Madison Avenue finally got off its ass—and not because of the five hundred dollars. In the weeks between the hearings and the charges, Martin Luther King had been murdered, and over a hundred of America’s cities had broken out in riots. After two decades of “progress,” the material well-being of the average black citizen had barely improved. The unrest that came in the wake of King’s death made it plain that this wasn’t a Watts problem, a Newark problem, or a Detroit problem. It was systemic, and it was bad for business. Riots stopped construction. Man-hours were lost. Property was damaged. Worst of all, terrified shoppers and their wallets stayed home, and anytime Americans aren’t spending money they don’t have on stuff they don’t need, the world’s largest economy grinds to a halt. The black revolution had finally hit the only nerve that really mattered: the bottom line.

  Miraculously, after decades of “not being able to find” qualified black employees, America was on a hiring binge. Some companies were way out in front. Spurred by the 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit, execs from Alcoa, Chase Manhattan Bank, and dozens of other companies had formed the Urban Coalition, calling for an “all-out attack on urban unemployment.” The King riots sent those efforts into overdrive. By the end of 1968, the New York Times reported that a list of companies running minority outreach programs would probably run “just about as long” as the listing of the New York Stock Exchange itself.

  Madison Avenue was late to the party. Advertising is not a business that deals directly with the public. It has no stores to burn, no products to boycott, making it slow to absorb the full implications of “this Negro thing.” By the time the agencies went looking, there weren’t any black people left. After the Fortune 500 scramble, pretty much every black person in America who would have been qualified to work in advertising was already sitting behind a desk somewhere else. Officials at the Urban League even admitted as much: all the college-educated, white-collar candidates were spoken for. And entry-level salaries in advertising were so low that it was impossible to lure candidates away from jobs they had already taken. In a twist, young black professionals started turning the agencies down, because they were already making twice as much at Xerox or General Mills.

  The legal and public pressure on the agencies, meanwhile, had only intensified. No more tokenism and no more stonewalling. And despite the hiring crunch, the NAACP and the Urban League were emphatic that the agencies not hire unqualified candidates, as low-performing employees would only exacerbate existing stereotypes. So as the 1960s drew to a close, Madison Avenue was stuck at the bottom of a sad little hole it had dug for itself. Under the threat of government sanction and public reprisal, the agencies had to hire black employees, but could hire only qualified black employees, even though there were no qualified black employees—and they had to do it now.

  Madison Avenue launched internship programs, inner-city outreach seminars, summer training courses—anything that would bring black hires in the door. Some initiatives were industry-wide, but most of the agencies were off starting their own. In fact, the sheer volume of competing and overlapping initiatives serves as a pretty good indicator of just how little thought, coordination, and foresight went into their execution. DDB joined with the New York State Employment Service to create a training program aimed at “the hard-core unemployed.” Under the program’s open-enrollment policy, only a tenth-grade reading proficiency was required to join; some applicants came in at only third- or fourth-grade reading levels. JWT haphazardly sped up its efforts as well. Where the agency had once tried to be thoughtful and diligent in its minority recruiting, now it, too, was taking all comers, even those without a high school diploma. GED classes were folded into its training programs. In the morning, students studied toward a high school equivalency exam, and in the afternoon they took advertising courses. (The men did, at least; women were trained in typing and secretarial skills.)

  Given the lack of objective professional and educational qualifications, the program administrators looked mostly for positive attitude, and many young blacks took to the programs with just that. “We are no longer ‘boys’ but men,” said one proud recruit, “and soon, hopefully, advertising men.” Another compared the program to finding “a gold mine.” Young people came from across the city, and almost overnight there were literally hundreds of new black hires on Madison Avenue. By the end of 1970, in less than two years, the number of blacks in advertising had more than doubled. Ogilvy & Mather had hired fifty; BBDO, fifty-three. The widest nets were cast at JWT and Y&R, which took on eighty-seven and a hundred and seven new black hires, respectively.

  Then enthusiasm ran into reality. What company needs a hundred entry-level hires on Tuesday that it didn’t need on Monday? Most of the new recruits weren’t there to become advertising men; they were there to pad the numbers, to make the issue go away. Now the industry really did have a problem: hundreds of black employees and not a clue what to do with them. At the low end, the washout rate was high. The hard-core unemployed and the high-school drop-outs never really stood a chance; the industry was just inflating their hopes and, very cynically, wasting their time.
When it came to the middle-ranking black hires, the average but enthusiastic, the industry just had no room for them. As in most corporate offices, mediocre white people already had the mediocrity tier all sewn up. Many blacks realized that their role was primarily decorative, a nonwhite face to put by the elevator in case the city regulators stopped by. They didn’t stay long.

  Like Roy Eaton, the only way for blacks to get recognized in advertising was to be absurdly overqualified. And many of the young black hires were. They were smart, talented, eager, and driven. And that was the problem. What do you do with the qualified blacks? The ones who did good work and expected to be fairly rewarded and promoted in return? Madison Avenue hadn’t really thought that far ahead. The power structure at the agencies was already in place. Every manager had his own turf, his own people, and no one was giving that up. Certainly not to the black guy. “There were some great talents,” Eaton says. “But even after many of them had demonstrated their skills, there was a ceiling. There were instances that infuriated me—a copy supervisor who was just brilliant in his concepts and creative ideas, and yet when it came to moving up they chose someone far inferior. It made him so mad he just left.”

  Those who didn’t hit the corporate glass ceiling ran headlong into the cultural one—the stifling WASPiness that dominated the industry. If you couldn’t conform to it, drop the right names, wear the right clothes, you weren’t going anywhere. Some blacks never learned how to navigate the cultural divide. Others simply chafed at it. “We have to become black Anglo-Saxons to make it,” one black account exec bitterly complained.

  Advertising isn’t baseball. America’s pastime is the ultimate meritocracy, with every stat measured and every player ranked accordingly. Advertising is the opposite of that. “Where’s the Beef?” “My baloney has a first name…” “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz—oh, what a relief it is.” They’re all pretty stupid sounding when you hear them out of context. How these ideas actually get people in stores to buy products—no one has a clue. The agencies pitch clients on focus-tested solutions and demographic market research, but every idea is a shot in the dark. Advertising sells itself like it’s a business model, when it’s really just being good at guessing.

  Madison Avenue isn’t an old boys’ network for no reason. “It’s a relationship business,” people tell you, which is true. On the creative side, writers and art directors work together the same way any creative group does. Like a rock band. Either you jam well together, or you don’t. You could be great but maybe I just don’t like your sound. A day in the life of advertising might be nothing more than you and your creative partner throwing Nerf balls at the ceiling while talking about your favorite TV shows. A little bit of friction is good to mix things up, but if you really don’t like each other, one of you isn’t going to stay.

  On the business side of things—account management—advertising is literally nothing but relationships. Building them and maintaining them. Knowing whose ass to kiss and when to kiss it—because if you don’t, the Cheerios people are going to take their millions of dollars and go to the next guy. And when a client hires an agency, the relationship is really all that they’re buying, because it’s the only thing that’s tangible. And in a relationship business, loyalty and familiarity trump most everything else. Advertising is making friends. That’s what the job is. The rest of it is just what you do between lunch breaks.

  “The difference between blacks who built success within the industry and those who didn’t,” Eaton explains, “was this matter of social networking, not talent. The head of production at Foote, Cone in San Francisco, he was black. But his father was a film editor at a major movie studio; he was already a part of that world. The dinner table conversations—it was not an alien experience for him.

  “For me, even though I had this high level of education, I always felt an insecurity that I was not as sophisticated as someone who had lived on Ninety-second Street. There’s this socialization that happens, a class issue. Even if people never said anything, there was an awareness that there was a life and a station that I was not privy to. That’s a barrier, if you let it be. My personality, I’m egocentric. Whatever it is, I’ll figure it out. Not everyone has that level of aggressive self-awareness.”

  However, he adds, “I must also plead guilty to buying into the subterfuge of the industry. Of being ignorant, really. It was almost as if, until I looked in the mirror, I didn’t consider myself black. Everybody else was white, and so was I. The nice things they were doing for me and the progress that I was making indicated, in my ignorance, that this was something anyone could do if they worked hard enough. My feeling frequently has been, ‘If I can do it, you can do it. Why the fuck aren’t you doing it?’ I was just as critical and judgmental as Bill Cosby, for example.

  “Racism is not a white malaise. It is there within the black population, too. It is there in self-image and in critical appraisal. You cannot say that the effect of two hundred years of pile drivers in your head will not have an impact. It must, and it does. I don’t have the answer to it. I just know that it has to come from both sides.”

  By that point, however, there was no solution coming from both sides. In the 1970s, if black people and white people couldn’t have a constructive conversation about whose dog crapped on the lawn, they weren’t going to hang out and write margarine commercials together, either. The younger black men coming up behind Eaton weren’t content to leave their race at the door. They weren’t willing to assimilate into the culture of the business, nor were they going to wait dutifully for the glass ceiling to magically open up on its own. So they did what every black group in America was doing. They organized, closed ranks.

  In 1968, before the affirmative action wave came in, the blacks who were in the industry had formed their own trade association, the Group for Advertising Progress (GAP). Its initial focus was on recruiting, training, mentoring—integrating blacks into the business. But as ambition gave way to frustration, GAP became a forum and an outlet for protest; Madison Avenue had its own Freedom, Inc. The group began tracking discrimination complaints and EEOC violations. It went to management with complaints and issued demands. Some of the more outspoken members went public, airing the industry’s dirty laundry at awards shows and conferences and in the press. “We jacked things up,” one member would later boast.

  “And that didn’t help,” Eaton says. “It created a resistance and a resentment on the part of the power structure. ‘We’ve opened up a hornet’s nest. We don’t need this.’ It did not encourage a continuation of hiring. It probably slowed it down. Closed it off entirely, as you can see now.

  “Should they not have expressed their resentment?” he asks, pausing to consider his answer. “Of course they should have. But there was a price to pay.”

  The price they paid was the end of racial integration in advertising. Political activism and whistle-blowing, though noble, never got anyone the corner office. Blacks who were willing to go along, stayed. Some did well. But those who made too much noise were shunted to work on third-tier accounts. Left to stagnate, many just left.

  What the political stalemate didn’t kill, the recession finished off. In 1973, along with the rest of corporate America, Madison Avenue started handing out pink slips. “And the blacks go first,” says Eaton. All the minority recruitment and training went, too, because why invest in the hiring pipeline when you’re not actually hiring? After 1970, the employment data on blacks in advertising gets thin; no one was keeping track. Pressure from civil rights groups waned as the movement stuttered to a halt nationwide. The NYCCHR put the ad agencies on “voluntary” compliance, which of course meant no compliance at all. By the early 1980s, blacks were gone. The major agencies looked more or less much the same as they had back when Roy Eaton first wandered in by mistake.

  Back in 1955, Eaton and Clarence Holte were pretty much the only two prominent blacks at major agencies. Despite what you’d think, the two were not close friends. “I didn’t get to know Clar
ence Holte that well,” Eaton says. “I knew him casually. There was a tension in the relationship because I was in general market. He was in blacks only. Creating that concept was in effect putting Jim Crow into the industry. I saw it as being done with negative intent. ‘Okay, we’ve got to find a place for them. Let’s put them there.’ It was not done to benefit or expand opportunities for blacks.”

  But over at BBDO, Clarence Holte thought the opposite. Black businessmen should embrace their role as racial emissaries, he felt, use it to speak up for black interests in the boardroom and to demand better goods and services for the black community, which was woefully underserved. Being “relegated” to the Negro market wasn’t marginalizing. It was empowering, a way to make black America stronger—and wealthier.

  The frosty relationship between Eaton and Holte was, of course, nothing more than the latest chapter in the ongoing discussion between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington: fight for equal opportunity or build ethnic solidarity? In advertising, the agencies’ brief experiment with integration had been such a disaster, and the taste it left was so bitter, that Booker T. Washington won by default. Defiant and proud, the Mad Black Men walked out, moved to the other side of Madison Avenue, and began building an advertising industry of their own.

  * When protesters picketed B&B’s office, Eaton went out to the street to tell them they had the wrong agency. “You should be picketing McCann,” he said; McCann had ten blacks to B&B’s eighty-three.

  [3]

  A Whole New Bag

  Byron Lewis and Roy Eaton started life on similar paths. Both grew up in New York, Eaton in Sugar Hill and Lewis in Queens. Both men were a part of the rising midcentury tide of black men able to go to college; while Eaton studied music, Lewis earned a degree in journalism at Long Island University. Both were drafted and served in Korea and returned home in 1955. When they reached Madison Avenue, however, their paths sharply diverged. The choices they made (and the ones they were forced to make) would come to define black America’s place in the industry for the next fifty years.