by Tanner Colby
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.
When the Madison Avenue Project launched in 2009, its primary complaint wasn’t about entry-level hiring. It was about promotions in the upper ranks. “Where are all the mid- and senior-level black executives?” the NAACP asked. The short answer is that they had left. The most successful blacks to emerge in the 1970s—the ones who stood a chance of breaking the glass ceiling, or at least cracking it for the next generation—all took the minority-incentive dollars to go out on their own. The old boys don’t respect you, you can make a better living across the street and have your name on the door? Who wouldn’t take that deal?
“They did it because all the perks of success would be available to them in a separate situation,” Roy Eaton explains. “There is that ingrained presumption: ‘If it’s open to me, I’ll exploit it.’ Simple as that.”
Which is precisely why so many black leaders were against minority business set-asides from the get-go; they were a diversion, a financial incentive to self-segregate. Once the black advertising niche had become profitable, many of the blacks who were left at major agencies quickly defected; the black agencies offered a comfortable atmosphere, no glass ceiling, decent money, and the chance to do important work for the community—an easy sell over suffocating WASPiness. With no pressure to replace those black hires, agencies didn’t. When the EEOC checked back in on black hiring in the industry in the mid-1980s, the percentage had fallen from a high of 3.5 percent in 1970 to a new low of 1.7 percent—both of those numbers including custodial and clerical positions. Madison Avenue just forgot about black people. The old boys were free to go right back to selling margarine, snorting cocaine, and banging their secretaries. “The basic power structure of the industry,” Eaton says, “was not impacted at all.”
In the pages of Ebony and Black Enterprise, the UniWorlds and Mingo-Joneses were lauded and celebrated. They were “a force to be reckoned with” and “serious contenders for big-budget accounts.” Yet they weren’t. As the years went by, black agencies did begin to forge meaningful partnerships with genuinely invested partners that produced good work. With brands like Burger King and 3 Musketeers, UniWorld’s portfolio would sometimes go beyond minority quotas and extend into the general-market arena. Black agencies did begin to amass annual billings in the hundreds of millions. But Madison Avenue’s balance sheet runs in the hundreds of billions. In 2000, Black Enterprise published its annual list of the top twenty black-owned advertising agencies. After three decades of minority business incentives, all twenty agencies combined accounted for 0.5 percent of the industry’s total revenues.
All the power stayed in the corporate boardrooms of the Fortune 500. If Black Power didn’t exert power there, it had no real power at all. The idea of a self-determined, “buy black” economy was a fantasy. Nowhere is this illustrated more tragically than with the Marlboro Man of Black Pride himself, the Brother in the Blue Dashiki. Lighting up a bold, cold Newport, he sold a whole new bag of menthol smoking—the profits of which all went to Lorillard Tobacco, a subsidiary of the American Tobacco Company, which grew out of the tobacco plantations of the Carolinas. Lorillard would later be named in a 2005 lawsuit as being a beneficiary of “assets acquired through the forced and uncompensated labors of enslaved African-Americans.”
The Brother was shilling for The Man.
Thirty years after Madison Avenue’s color line was broken, the industry had reverted all the way back to major league and Negro league. By the time the split was finished, even Jackie Robinson was asked to leave the field. In 1980, Roy Eaton found himself in a disagreeable spot with the woman brought in to run the division above his. They clashed, he refused to cede control of his team, and she froze him out, cutting his budget to the point where the agency couldn’t afford to keep him. It was a personal vendetta, he insists, and not race. But if his color didn’t get him fired, his rarefied status offered him no protection, either. “Before that,” Eaton says, “any personal difficulties I’d had were insignificant because of the status I had built. But the self-satisfaction of ‘been there, done that’ with the blacks meant all bets were off. It enabled them to, in effect, fire me without fear of consequence.”
Eaton left Benton & Bowles and set up his own music production shop, hoping for big things. “You would think that my reputation over the years would have opened doors to all the agencies. It didn’t.” White clients didn’t come beating down his door. Despite his philosophical differences with the black agencies, he wound up very happy to have them, as he relied on them more and more for commissions. The only work Roy Eaton got from the general-market agencies came not because of his credentials, he says, but through his friends.
* Nixon’s people went to great pains in their PR efforts to insist that the program’s “goals and timetables” weren’t actually quotas. As soon as the plan was challenged in court, however, the unions were found guilty of not meeting the goals. The imposed penalty was that they had to meet the goals, which made them quotas. America is still trying to figure out the difference.
* So did the granddaddy conservative of them all, California governor Ronald Reagan, who wrote a personal letter to the head of the OMBE praising “bootstrap” programs for minorities. Reagan was for minority set-asides before he was against them.
[4]
The Inescapable Network
The idea that only blacks could
advertise to blacks—and by extension whites to whites—chugged along smoothly and largely unexamined until December of 1983. With Thriller on its way to becoming the bestselling album of all time, pop superstar Michael Jackson landed a $5 million endorsement deal from Pepsi. It was the biggest celebrity endorsement deal in history. It would hold that record until Jackson reupped it for $15 million two years later.
Pretty soon, Bill Cosby had the number one TV show in the country, and Eddie Murphy was one of the biggest box office draws in the world. Run-DMC came out of Hollis, Queens, and brought hip-hop into the mainstream. It became painfully clear what Roy Eaton had known all along: culture doesn’t have a color line. Groups may have a different vernacular, their art may be rooted in certain ethnic traditions, but once a great idea gets out into the ether it doesn’t respect any boundaries. You can’t take a business of ideas and mandate where black stuff and white stuff is supposed to go. “The division had nothing to do with talent,” Roy Eaton says, “or even profitability. It was just based on racial assumptions.”
Eaton had started selling Beefaroni to white people in 1955, and even then the only reason blacks “couldn’t” sell to whites was because they were rarely given the chance. The only reason whites “couldn’t” sell to blacks wasn’t because they were white, but because they were stone ignorant. But after Michael Jackson, Madison Avenue started to reconsider its assumptions. In Portland, Oregon, a bunch of white guys at a firm called Wieden + Kennedy took Nike’s Air Jordan and made it one of the iconic brands of urban America; Air Jordan grossed $130 million in sales in its first year alone.
Sorting white talent and black talent on opposite sides of the street officially became a terrible idea in 1992. MC Hammer became the first rapper to land a major endorsement deal for commercial television. Young & Rubicam hired him to be the spokesman for Kentucky Fried Chicken. In a now infamous commercial, MC Hammer rolls into a small-town KFC while on tour, and no one behind the counter can believe that he’s really the MC Hammer. So Hammer does his flashy Hammer dance… and then they give him some fried chicken. Every black person in America looked up at the TV set and said, “Really? Black man dancing for chicken?”
Byron Lewis had called it: America was becoming an increasingly multicultural marketplace, but Madison Avenue didn’t have the vocabulary to communicate with its own customers. Regardless, there was no going back. No matter how the advertising industry was structured, the Great American Mix Tape kept on mixing. White kids started buying De La Soul albums in their baggy jeans, and black kids were hitting the courts with little alligators on their tennis togs. Ever true to its nature, corporate America followed the money. General-market agencies started big-footing black agencies, muscling in on their turf—and kept making horrible MC Hammer–grade mistakes in the process.
Madison Avenue needed black people. Only when agencies looked around the recruiting pipeline to find them, they weren’t there. Most aspiring black professionals were following their peers into other fields; they never thought to consider a career in advertising because there weren’t any black people in advertising to tell them about all the wonderful opportunities for black people in advertising. In 1968, urban riots had finally given Madison Avenue a financial incentive to bring minority talent in. One year later, Richard Nixon and Jesse Jackson flipped the script, giving ad agencies every incentive to pay the diversity dollars out—they would get in trouble, in fact, if they didn’t pay the diversity dollars out. And black agencies had every incentive to take the money and stay on the other side of the street. Then everybody spent a couple decades not talking to one another. All through the eighties and early nineties, for appearances’ sake, most of the major agencies kept up halfhearted minority recruitment policies, but nothing was done to mentor or groom those young people to become players in the industry. Very few stuck around and broke through. Few enough that they’re real easy to find. “As far as black creative directors out there who are doing really interesting work,” one said to me, “in my personal opinion, there are seven of us. And that’s being generous. Maybe eight? It’s a problem.”
Vann Graves wound up in advertising because he was a big fan of Bewitched, the kitschy 1960s sitcom about a suburban witch/housewife and her put-upon husband, Darrin. “I wish it were a more dramatic story,” Vann tells me. “But I watched that show all the time when I was a kid. Darrin was in advertising, and I thought, ‘Wow, what a cool thing. He’s got a nice house and a nice-looking wife.’ That was my introduction to the business.”
Born in 1968 in Richmond, Virginia, onetime capital of the Confederacy, Vann Graves was part of that singular generation of black Americans, the Children of the Dream, vested with the hopes of all their parents had fought for in the civil rights era. Vann’s father had been on the front lines of that battle, going to jail in 1960 for desegregating the downtown lunch counters with a group of students known as the Richmond 34. By the time Vann came along, his father worked for a juvenile detention home—worked two jobs sometimes—and his mother worked at the department of motor vehicles. In 1969, they were one of the first black families to move into what was then the all-white neighborhood of Ginter Park so that Vann and his older brother could attend the public schools there. “Growing up with parents who were active during the civil rights movement,” Vann says, “their expectation was, ‘Now that we’ve done our part and built the foundation, you can be a doctor or a lawyer.’ So when I started talking about advertising, they were like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I may as well have said I wanted to be the Tooth Fairy. Advertising wasn’t seen as a real career path.”
In high school, Vann had been told by one of his white teachers that he would never go to college, that he wasn’t even equipped to graduate from high school. Today, Vann has one master’s degree completed and is working on his second, from Harvard. “The racism started early,” he says, and he wouldn’t have gotten past it but for his family behind him, pushing him. But in applying to college, other than vague thoughts about advertising, all Vann really knew was that he wanted to see the world outside Richmond. This was not the world he’d seen on Bewitched, but one that came into his living room every Thursday night on NBC.
Had W. E. B. Du Bois been a television critic, he might have written about the “twoness” of The Cosby Show. What the Children of White Flight took from Cosby—certainly what I took from it—was that black people were Just Like Us. Black doctor and black lawyer in a nice big house. Nothing not normal about that. Several hundred miles away in Richmond, Vann was watching a completely different program than I was. What the Children of the Dream took from Cosby was to honor their cultural forebears, stay true to their black identity, follow that, and that would bring them the American Dream.
When it first aired, Cosby was often criticized for showing only the comfortable, middle-class life of a black doctor and attorney, for avoiding the problems of race. But in its own way, Cosby was all about race. The painting that hung in Cliff and Claire Huxtable’s living room was a seminal work from Harlem Renaissance artist Ellis Wilson. When Cliff goes to a school charity auction, he gets caught up bidding on a vintage LP of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.” The defiant stance of black identity made by the Brother in the Blue Dashiki had been framed all too often as a rejection of whatever was white, but the quiet revolution of Cosby was to celebrate black accomplishment in and of itself. Being black wasn’t predicated on rejecting anything; it was entirely consonant with mainstream American success.
One thing the Huxtables were proudest of was that Mom and Dad had met and courted at the historically black Hillman College, a lightly fictionalized stand-in for Howard University in Washington, D.C., itself sometimes known as the “black Harvard” or simply “the Mecca.” Wanting to carry on that tradition, when the show’s third season began in the fall of 1986, Denise Huxtable goes off to school at Hillman. For all of Vann’s senior year in high school, Denise was on TV calling home every Thursday night, loving black college life.
The very next fall, the story of her sophomore year was picked up in the Cosby spin-off, A Different World. When it did, Vann was watching from his dorm room at Howard. “There was this new resurgence of black pride brought on by the world of Cosby,” he says. “There was pride in historically black colleges and things that stemmed from the African-American culture. Why wouldn’t you want to be a part of that? I remember watching the very first episode of A Different World and hearing the Whitley Gilbert character saying, ‘Richmond was so hot you could fry an egg on a Jaguar.’ As goofy as it may sound, I saw that someone from my hometown had made it. It wasn’t far from reality. A black kid from Richmond can go to college, can go beyond Richmond. A lot of the kids that went to Howard then, if you ask them what pushed them as far as seeing what was possible, at some point they’re going to reference back to The Cosby Show.”
The year after Denise Huxtable went off to Hillman, applications to America’s historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, spiked by 14 percent nationwide. They had been on the rise, in fact, since the early 1980s. In 1983, America’s majority-white colleges reported their first overall dip in black student attendance since the civil-rights era. That same year, Howard’s enrollment spiked by 25 percent, many of them transfers from those same white schools. Black college presidents boasted of a cultural homecoming. Their students had “gotten over” the assimilationist notions that white schools were inherently better. In December of ’83, Ebony reported a “dramatic comeback” in the growth and vitality of black fraternities and sororities, on both black and white campuses alike. So many applications that “we just can’t accommodate all of them,” said the president of Alpha Phi Alpha, the historic fraternity that boasted alumni ranging from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to the Olympian Jesse Owens. It was a generational shift. The Children of the Dream were coming of age and going off to college, and, like all college students, many were rebelling against the mantle that others had tried to put on them. “Part of the reason a lot of African Americans went to HBCUs at that time,” Vann says “was because our parents had sent us to white high schools to give us opportunity or we’d been bused to a white high school, but many of us felt isolated and cut off. We were the Children of the Dream, but we also wanted to have some kind of shared experience in the African-American culture.”
