Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  Pivoting to the urban economic front, Nixon just as swiftly made good on his promise of results. Same as with school busing, real results demanded statistical proof of significant progress. Racial balance. Quotas. As hard as Johnson had pressed on racial balance in schools, jobs were a different matter. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it expressly forbade “preferential treatment to any individual or to any group” based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” For Democrats, this was a stance made out of political necessity. Since most blacks were blue-collar wage earners, labor unions were the first groups to face the threat of racial preferences in hiring. Blacks were becoming a solid Democratic constituency, but Big Labor was still the backbone of the party; government procurement contracts were a fat, pork-laden pipeline for kickbacks and political patronage. Big Labor didn’t want quotas, and whatever the Democrats’ commitment to racial equality, they were going to let the plumbers and the electricians slide for as long as they could.

  If Democrats opposed racial preferences out of self-serving pragmatism, civil rights leaders opposed them on ethical grounds. Martin Luther King had never ruled them out entirely, but felt it would be tragic if America reached a point where such a system were the only option left. Other black leaders agreed. When the subject of racial quotas was raised at the 1966 White House Conference on Civil Rights, one NAACP spokesman said flatly, “This is the very thing we have been fighting against.” America’s civil rights leaders still had their eyes on the prize: full civic, social, and economic inclusion in society. To come all this way and settle for a few thousand jobs here and there, they’d be taking the short money. They weren’t in it for the short money—that is, until the money was actually on the table.

  Affirmative action as we know it today was born out of a stalemate between civil rights leaders and labor unions in Philadelphia. As in most cities, black construction workers were consigned either to nonunion jobs or to the low-wage jobs of the unskilled labor unions. The skilled-labor unions—the ones with high-paying jobs and good pensions, such as the plumbers and electricians—excluded blacks almost entirely. At the time, construction was booming. Federal dollars were pouring into urban renewal and suburban housing and highway sprawl. The government should have had considerable authority to impose fair employment practices on the unions working those projects. It didn’t.

  The problem, again, was the old boys’ network. Philadelphia’s unions were controlled by an airtight network of family, church, and community. Forty percent of licensed plumbers in Philadelphia had sons who were also plumbers. In 1964, every apprentice accepted to the electricians’ union had been either the son or nephew of a current member. The tile layers were Italian. Sheet metal workers were Scottish, Irish, or German. Every group had a lock on a particular union, and they all took care of their own. Between 1963 and 1967, pressure from the government and the NAACP had produced a total of thirty-four black construction jobs in Philadelphia.

  To break the impasse, federal contract compliance regulators had tried to impose goals and timetables for hiring—the “Philadelphia Plan,” this was called. But before it launched, Lyndon Johnson’s comptroller general shut it down; the “goals and timetables” were really race-based quotas and therefore unconstitutional. However, President-elect Nixon and his domestic aides saw the plan as not only legal but potentially lifesaving. Republicans had no political stake in protecting Big Labor, black unemployment was at the root of the urban unrest, and good construction jobs were just the sort of results he’d promised to deliver to make the problem go away.

  Nixon made the Philadelphia Plan a centerpiece of his very first address to Congress, calling it “historic and critical.” By early 1970, the Philadelphia Plan was declared such a success that similar programs went into effect in nineteen cities across the country. Dozens more would follow. Affirmative action—meaning goals and timetables for hiring—was now in place.*

  During its first nine months in office, the Nixon administration would fundamentally overhaul and redefine the relationship between race and the workplace. That spring, it amended the mandates President Johnson had established in government contracting. Before, the law had applied only to procurement contracts; now it was expanded to include any institution that received any federal funds of any kind, including universities, research institutions—everyone, almost, since so many institutions interact with the government on some level. In August, Nixon followed this up with Executive Order 11478, which called for swift and immediate affirmative action in all government employment. Any idealistic notions about color blindness had gone out the window. Now the hiring, firing, promoting, and recruiting of minorities was all to be documented and detailed in every particular. The big racial accounting system we’d built to monitor our schools had expanded to cover nearly every corner of the workplace as well.

  Nixon’s signature civil rights initiative would be his “black capitalism” plan. Under the Johnson administration, blacks and other minorities had been eligible for special loans under the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program, but it was not a major legislative initiative. Nixon thrust it front and center, skipping congressional approval by putting his program under the wing of the executive branch. On March 5, 1969, Nixon signed an executive order establishing the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) to much celebrity fanfare. Jackie Robinson (the actual Jackie Robinson) was a big booster of black-owned businesses, and he publicly endorsed the plan as precisely the kind of assistance the government should be offering. The OMBE set aside millions in federal dollars to fund black-owned businesses and Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Corporations, venture capital funds run by private interests that would also invest in black business independently. These programs, Nixon promised, would give black America “not dependency” but “a piece of the action.”

  Nixon’s sweeping affirmative action mandates had an immediate impact. By the end of 1970, 20 percent of all black workers were employed by government agencies—a number that included 72 percent of college-educated black women and 57 percent of college-educated black men. Between 1969 and 1972, total black income rose from $38.7 billion to $51.1 billion, and by 1973 deposits in minority-owned banks had gone from $400 million to $1 billion. Between 1970 and 1975, federal procurement from all minority-owned businesses rose from $9 million to $250 million. And on Madison Avenue, UniWorld and the business of black advertising finally had the foundation to start growing.

  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 v
iable, 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.