Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  Lewis didn’t stumble onto Madison Avenue by accident. He started in newspapers, selling ads for the Harlem-based New York Citizen-Call. He wasn’t terribly successful. White agencies controlled the purse strings for all the major advertising accounts, and very few media buyers saw the value in reaching black markets. (Cigarettes, liquor, and beauty-care brands were among the few products aggressively marketed to black consumers.) The Citizen-Call closed its doors in 1961 due to lack of advertising revenue. The same year, Lewis and several colleagues from the paper tried their hand at magazine publishing, launching The Urbanite. Featuring criticism and essays from the likes of James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, this New Yorker–esque publication aimed itself at the growing college-educated, middle-class black communities in the urban enclaves of the North.

  In Harlem, Lewis had become part of a postwar generation of strivers. His entrepreneurial efforts had put him in the company of other ambitious black Americans, men like Reverend Adam Clayton Powell and Charles Rangel, who represented Harlem in Congress, and David Dinkins, who would go on to serve as New York’s first black mayor. Unfortunately, being at the heart of Harlem’s literary and political worlds meant little to the people who had the money. Langston Hughes doesn’t sell Buicks, or so Madison Avenue felt at the time. Like the Citizen-Call, the Urbanite folded after just a few months. “I think it would have been quite successful,” Lewis says of the venture, “had we understood more about advertising.”

  Few moments have had an impact on American history like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, yet when TV networks aired the 1963 March on Washington they had to air it commercial-free, because no sponsors would touch it; King got airtime only because the march was too big to ignore. Advertising is the thing that everybody loves to hate. But it’s also the cornerstone of a free press, essential to the exercise of the First Amendment. Advertising pays, or doesn’t pay, for investigative reporters to dig up the truth. Advertising pays for the news anchors and editors who shape the media narrative. Today, advertising pays for whole twenty-four-hour news channels. Control the ad dollars, and you control a great many things. Byron Lewis came away from his publishing failures with a firm conviction: if blacks were to have a real voice in American affairs, they had to assert greater control over not just the depiction of blacks in modern mass media, but also the corporate dollars that funded it. Shelving Aunt Jemima was just the start of it. This was about the money.

  During the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, instead of marching the streets, Lewis sent himself to grad school. While taking business and public relations classes at NYU, he spent the next few years in and out of work and eventually landed a sales job in the classifieds department of the New York Times. It was not glamorous work, but every week it gave him an early preview of the help-wanted ads from advertising, marketing, and media companies—and a two-day head start in answering them. “The ads,” Lewis says, “would typically read, ‘College graduate wanted. Ivy League type. Own correspondence. Willingness to travel.’ I was a college graduate, I did my own typing, and I was obviously willing to travel. So I would send letters to the P.O. boxes with my résumé. During the week after work and on lunch hours, I would call the people I got responses from.”

  He accumulated a large pile of rejection letters, but also a good number of interviews. He would go, the interviewers would be very polite, and then he’d never get called back. Lewis did this every week, he says, for four years—the same four years, it so happens, that Madison Avenue was inviting ALL BRIGHT YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN TO CONSIDER ADVERTISING AS A CAREER.

  “Ignorance is bliss,” Lewis says, “and I’m glad I was ignorant at that particular time. I just kept trying. Then one day I went for an interview, and the gentleman said, ‘Mr. Lewis, have you been here before?’

  “I had been to so many interviews, I couldn’t remember. I said, ‘I don’t think so.’

  “And he said, ‘I think you have, because I remember you. And I kind of felt sorry.’

  “He got up and he shut the door and he said, ‘This conversation was never held, Mr. Lewis. Those ads that you responded to—“College graduate, Ivy League type”—did not mean blacks or Hispanics or even some other groups. That’s what those ads mean; they’re coded. In all other areas, you’d be an ideal candidate because you’re willing and you’re determined, and I only tell you this so you shouldn’t waste your time.’”

  Byron Lewis stopped wasting his time. He quit going on interviews, even quit his job at the Times, and turned to the resources he could trust in the black community to start his own company, UniWorld. Today, Lewis owns the oldest continuously operating black advertising agency in the country, and he’s a millionaire many times over.

  Before going into the ad game, Byron Lewis had spent considerable time as a social worker on New York’s Lower East Side. His caseload included the early generations of European Jewish immigrants. From there he also witnessed the growth of Chinatown and the early arrival of African-American and Hispanic residents. The experience gave him a premonition of America’s future, that each successive generation would be more culturally and racially diverse than the last—ethnic marketing was a growth industry. That idea became the basis on which he started his agency.

  The odds were not in his favor. On the day he opened for business, a handful of other black agencies were jostling for the limited black advertising market as well, most of them run by people with far more experience than Byron Lewis. But within a few years, all of them, save UniWorld, would close. A successful black agency, it turns out, works pretty much the same way a successful white agency does. Lewis outlasted his competition because he knew a guy who knew a guy.

  “I started based on relationships that I had developed in Harlem and when I was in sales,” he says. “I was also part of a network that gave me real access to African Americans working in any capacity in communications—the black press, the people who were in marketing at major corporations on a national basis. If you were in a certain line of business, the black community was very small in terms of people who had ‘made it.’ It was really a network that extended through most of the African Americans who had gone to college. People like Percy Sutton, founder of the Inner City Broadcast Empire; Bruce Llewellyn, CEO of Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Company; Earl Graves, the founder of Black Enterprise magazine. It also included people like the first black governor of Virginia, Douglas Wilder; Jesse Jackson; Jesse Owens. We had a remarkable kinship because it was like a family, which I’m very glad to have had—it is a relationship business.”

  The Madison Avenue network may have shut Lewis out, but through all his years of success and failure, he’d been building a network of his own. For UniWorld’s first client, he approached Heublein, a food and liquor distributor with whom he had built a good rapport a few years before as a salesman. Based on their past working relationship, Heublein gave him the Smirnoff Vodka account for all black-targeted media.

  UniWorld was now in business, but business was slow. During the early seventies, most of corporate America was reticent to invest in minority advertising. The cash crunch killed off most of the black agencies. UniWorld’s viability would depend on other streams of revenue. While his competitors struggled, Lewis turned to his connections in the black political establishment, pitching his company to work on state and municipal campaigns for the emerging generation of black mayors and members of Congress. In 1970, UniWorld’s political work helped elect Kenneth Gibson the first black mayor of Newark, New Jersey.

  Years before, Lewis had also become friends with Al Bell, owner of the legendary Memphis R&B label Stax Records. Bell had recently approached MGM to adapt an action movie from a series of pulp crime novels by Ernest Tidyman about a detective working the mean streets of Harlem—a black private dick who’s a sex machine with all the chicks. Bell’s idea was that the movie would provide Stax with a vehicle to produce a sound track. He also leaned on MGM to hire a black ad agency to market the film.
The studio agreed, and Bell recommended his pal Lewis.

  “Shaft’s his name. Shaft’s his game.”

  Byron Lewis wrote the movie’s catchy tagline, which was plastered on movie posters and used in commercials over Isaac Hayes’s iconic, Oscar-winning score. With box office receipts of $15 million, Shaft was a huge hit, kicking off a host of sequels and the entire blaxploitation genre. UniWorld was in with black Hollywood on the ground floor. More work followed.

  It’s not just who you know, of course, but what you do with who you know. Lewis survived largely because he possessed the same qualities that any successful businessperson has. He was relentless, and he had good instincts. He also had a knack for turning adversity into opportunity—if conventional avenues were closed to him because of his race, he’d create new ones and make his money there. The single biggest obstacle in his path was structural. Ad agencies make their money as a commission on the volume of media dollars sold, and there just wasn’t much black-targeted media space to sell. Local black-owned radio stations and newspapers were viable outlets. Essence and Black Enterprise had joined Ebony and Jet as national magazines aimed at black consumers. Soul Train had become a hit on syndicated television. But that was about all the territory a black adman had to work with. It wasn’t enough. So Byron Lewis created his own.

  In 1974, he took nearly all of his operating capital and used it to produce a daily syndicated soap opera for black radio, Sounds of the City, which gave him marquee programming to sell ads against. It was a huge risk, and it paid off. Quaker Oats signed on to sponsor the show. Sounds of the City gave UniWorld its first million in sales. Quaker remained a UniWorld client for decades. The company’s portfolio expanded to include black-targeted work for Kodak, Ford Motors, AT&T, and Kraft. By 1975, Byron Lewis was clocking $5 million in annual billings, and he had the only black advertising agency left in New York City.

  Lewis wouldn’t be alone for long. UniWorld—along with other black agencies that were growing in Chicago, such as the Vince Cullers agency and Burrell Communications—had built a business model that worked, and other black entrepreneurs began moving in to compete for the space. Unlike Lewis, virtually all the people behind these new shops had cut their teeth in, and had left, the mainstream ad world. They were not the washouts or the political agitators, either; they were some of the most successful black creatives and executives ever to work on Madison Avenue.

  As the head of the Miller Brewing account at McCann-Erickson, Frank Mingo had overseen the market introduction of Miller Lite. Its “Taste’s Great, Less Filling” campaign would become one of the most successful product launches of all time. Mingo left McCann and joined forces with BBDO’s Caroline Jones, the first black female vice president at a major agency. In 1977, they started Mingo-Jones, taking the black segment of accounts like KFC and the Walt Disney Company. That same year, thanks to one very memorable phrase—“Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman”—a young black copywriter named Carol Williams was named the first female vice president at the Leo Burnett agency in Chicago. In the early 1980s, she would leave and form her own company, too. Close to a dozen new black agencies emerged in those years. More would follow.

  But even for a man of Byron Lewis’s talents, the right instincts and the right relationships alone wouldn’t have been sufficient to build a viable black-owned business in 1969. Capitalism requires, above all else, access to capital. Before Lewis’s time, black entrepreneurs didn’t have it. Major banks wouldn’t lend to them, private equity saw little upside to investing in them, and corporate America had no interest in partnering with them. For black agencies just to get into the game, access to investment capital and corporate accounts had to be leveraged politically. “There would be nobody in these companies,” Lewis says, “and we would not be having this conversation, without affirmative action.”

  And the man who gave them affirmative action was America’s thirty-seventh president, Richard Milhous Nixon.

  When assembling his new administration in the fall of 1968, President-elect Nixon appointed longtime confidant H. R. Haldeman to serve as his chief of staff. To staff up the West Wing, Haldeman and Nixon turned—where else?—to their old boys’ network. Haldeman chose as his deputy a young man named Lawrence Higby. Dwight Chapin came on as special assistant to the president, responsible for appointments and television appearances. Ken Cole served as assistant to the president for domestic affairs. Most prominently, Ron Ziegler was tapped to serve as the administration’s press secretary. Higby, Chapin, Cole, and Ziegler had all worked under H. R. Haldeman during the twenty years he’d spent as an account executive and vice president at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.

  The Mad Men were running the White House. They’d also run Nixon’s campaign, the messaging of which had been tailored perfectly for the Republican Party’s new core demographic: the white suburban majority. Nixon didn’t need black votes to get elected, but he still needed a solution to their problems. Implied in his pitch to suburban voters was the idea that “this Negro thing” could be managed without whites having to be bothered with it. And with the cities besieged by riots, something had to be done, as Nixon put it, “not to have the goddamned country blow up.”

  The country was blowing up because the one thing black people aspired to most was the one thing they hadn’t gotten so far: results. To function in a capitalistic economy, owners need access to capital and workers need access to jobs. Nixon needed the country to function. So in April of 1968, with the country flailing in response to Martin Luther King’s assassination, candidate Nixon rolled out the first of his new product pitches for black America. He took to the radio to lay out a comprehensive urban economic program. “Bridges to Human Dignity,” his campaign called the address. In it, Nixon proposed a cornucopia of programs that spoke directly to the rising feelings of nationalist sentiment in the black community. He called for massive investments in depressed urban neighborhoods and schools, support for historically black colleges, job training that produced actual jobs. Nixon also outlined what would become known as his “black capitalism” initiative, government loans and incentives to foster “black ownership… black pride, black jobs, black opportunity, and, yes, black power, in the best, most constructive sense of that often misapplied term.”

  In a country where blacks were once owned, the idea of black ownership was a powerful one. Many black nationalists believed that a self-contained, self-determined black economy was the only way to escape exploitation at the hands of whites. That notion ran up against certain realities of the free market, but it still held considerable sway. Through the Booker T. Washington Business Association, conservative black leaders endeavored to build a strong entrepreneurial class. In the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the thirties and forties, black economic solidarity had played an important role in opening up what limited opportunities existed at the time. During the early sixties, Malcolm X more than anyone had championed the notion of “buying black,” not letting whites own all the stores, keeping black dollars in black hands. The problem for black business was that even the most practical of these ideas had never delivered substantial, sustainable access to jobs and capital. It wasn’t until 1966 that someone finally figured out how to use black pride to make the cash register ring.

  During Martin Luther King’s failed Chicago housing campaign, he’d established an economic development program called Operation Breadbasket, a grab bag of various tactics the movement had used in the past—boycotts, labor walkouts, selective-buying campaigns—all oriented toward wringing concessions out of white manufacturers and employers. In cities across the country, these tactics had produced minor, fitful gains. In Chicago, the program was run by a young, charismatic preacher named Jesse Jackson. Alternately described as a savior or a shakedown artist, Jackson took on corporate America with a savvy and a fearlessness that brought CEOs to the bargaining table. His first major victory, after a fourteen-week boycott against the A&P grocery stor
e chain, yielded dozens of jobs, an agreement to stock products from black-owned companies on shelves, a guarantee to place ads in local black-owned media, and a contract to hire black-owned sanitation firms for the company’s garbage collection.

  Given the era, Jackson’s success on the jobs front was bewildering. It was alchemy. In less than two years, Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket had netted black Chicagoans more than three thousand jobs, increased their personal income by $22 million, and roped in $15 million in deposits for black-owned banks. Blacks rallied to Jackson’s Sunday services by the thousands. Martin Luther King had inspired a generation with his sermons, but all his lofty talk of Promised Lands and mutual garments of destiny hadn’t yet put bread on anyone’s table. Jackson preached a gospel that resonated in the here and now: “Say it loud! I’m black and I’m proud—and I buy Grove Fresh orange juice!”

  The product launch for Nixon’s Bridge to Human Dignity was perfectly timed. Once in office, on the matter of protecting his white suburban voting base, the new president made little pretense about his intentions. In fact, his entire domestic agenda on integrationist civil rights policies can be neatly summed up in the instructions he gave his attorney general in selecting the administration’s first Supreme Court nominee. The candidate had to be “a conservative Southerner” who was “against busing, and against forced housing integration in the suburbs.” Beyond that, Nixon said, “he can do what he pleases.”