by Tanner Colby
As of right now, it’s hard to tell how much the black agencies want to evolve, or if they even can, given their history. Earlier this year, KFC ran some horribly misbegotten ad in Australia in which a white guy makes friends with a bunch of dancing Aborigines at a cricket match by giving them a bucket of fried chicken. Black men dancing for chicken. Again. The standard uproar ensued. Jesse Jackson appeared on cue and demanded that KFC spend 10 percent of all its national media dollars targeting blacks through minority-owned advertising agencies, increase its minority-owned franchises to 33 percent, up its managerial-level hiring to 25 percent, and hire a diversity director to carry out all of the above. KFC agreed to all of it, and at the 2010 Rainbow PUSH convention, the company president trotted his ass out to the podium and did the White Man Apology Dance: “At KFC, we are very proud of our diversity track record and the progress we’ve made over the years, but we realize there’s a lot more we can do.”
“It’s regressing back to the 1970s,” Vann Graves says.
Byron Lewis was right. While the Madison Avenue boys were up on the forty-second floor writing margarine commercials to air on The Brady Bunch, Lewis saw the teeming, multiethnic throngs on the Lower East Side and knew that they would be a big part of America’s future. Madison Avenue told him to stop wasting his time, but what he and the other black agencies did in proving the value of minority consumers paved the way for Madison Avenue to take Nike and Michael Jordan and go to the moon. Now, the more successful Lewis’s original vision is, the less necessary his own business becomes. “UniWorld is Byron Lewis,” Graves says. “He’s an O.G., and I respect him immensely for what he’s done. He stood on that pedestal and said, ‘I’m going to do this.’ And it worked. And it was needed. But the world has changed.”
The world’s not changing. It’s reverting, going back to its natural state.
In 1890, when the Separate Car Act was put to a vote in Louisiana, before it went on to be sanctioned by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, some of the law’s loudest critics were the railroad companies. If the coach car on the five o’clock train was only half full, and only three colored passengers had bought tickets, why should they haul a separate railcar for a handful of people? With the extra fuel and freight, they’d lose money. It didn’t make sense. Segregation never made sense. Which is why, as far as the market is concerned, separate will never be equal—if I have to install two water fountains where I only need one, I’m not going to spend a whole lot of money on the second.
The black-for-black’s-sake business model never really worked in the ad business, and the constant complaint is that racism is to blame for that. But what if that’s not the only reason? What if the market is just telling us it doesn’t want separate railcars anymore, because it never wanted them in the first place? And what if that’s a good thing? The Internet has given black media a whole new playing field, but it has also obliterated the idea that black-owned businesses can exist inside their own politically supported ecosystem. Wherever our new information economy is taking us, it’s too fluid and too fast moving for a system that says black stuff goes here and white stuff goes there. The Internet doesn’t want to haul separate railcars. In fact, it won’t haul them for very much longer, and you’ve got to make the jump from one to the other if you want to stay on the ride.
In October of 2009, after just eighteen months at UniWorld, Vann left to take a job as group creative director at McCann-Erickson.
When critics of advertising say that the industry is racist, that it does not practice discrimination but that it is discriminatory in its nature, they’re absolutely right. A liquid will always take the shape of the container you pour it in. In much the same way, a relationship business will always take on the qualities of the social environment that surrounds it.
At the diversity events that agencies put on, people always get up and go on about how we need to make this industry “look like America.” But that’s just it. Madison Avenue does look like America. White people with all the best-paying jobs on one side, black people struggling with limited opportunities on the other, and a bunch of lawyers and consultants negotiating the demilitarized zone in between. That’s America, and that’s the problem. In a relationship business in a country that’s majority white, and where white people have the majority of the money, whites and assimilated minorities will always move much further, much faster than unassimilated minorities. Is that unfair? Yes. Is it illegal? Maybe. Is it prosecutable? Not on any level that means anything.
The NAACP has done and continues to do many important things. Thus far, threatening to sue the advertising industry wouldn’t appear to be one of them. A social network is not an institution to be attacked. It’s a maze to be navigated, a puzzle to be solved, and the black political establishment hasn’t shown much aptitude for solving it. As I write this, lawyers for the Madison Avenue Project have collected what they say are concrete claims of discrimination against all four major holding companies, and they have filed those claims with the EEOC. Now everyone gets to sit and wait while the wheels of justice grind forward. Whatever kind of settlement is in the works, lawyers being lawyers, no one is really saying. But it’s now been three years since the Madison Avenue Project was launched. It’s been seven years since the New York City Commission on Human Rights opened hearings on the industry’s hiring practices, twelve years since President Clinton ordered up more blacks in advertising from the Oval Office, and thirteen years since the Congressional Black Caucus started banging heads with Ogilvy & Mather over those anti-drug commercials that don’t actually get kids off drugs. In that time, the first Internet revolution has come and gone, the second one is already well under way, and another generation of young black people has come of age and not gone into advertising.
While the NAACP has been busy railing on about the old boys’ network, other people have been solving it, rewiring it, putting it to better ends. In 2009, just as Vann Graves was headed back to the major-agency world, Geoff Edwards was walking out. He quit. He was tired of playing the game the way it was being played. His feet felt heavy going to work. “This industry is supposed to be about breaking rules,” Geoff says. “We talk to our clients all the time about taking chances and doing things differently, but we don’t take our own advice.”
Geoff and his creative partner, Mauro Alencar, left their jobs, holed up at a San Francisco coffee shop, mapped out a five-year plan, and in December of 2009 launched DOJO, a boutique agency specializing in what they call “tradigital,” work that transcends the old media silos of print, TV, and Internet. It’s all seamlessly integrated—like the people who created it.
“On paper,” Edwards says, “technically we’re a minority-owned company, but it’s impossible to say this is a black agency, because the culture is made up of several different cultures. The management team is an African American and a Brazilian. We kind of laugh a bit. If this were a model for all the agencies, the industry would be there already. In our first year we had fifteen employees who represented seven different countries. And it’s not like it was picked that way. It’s just talented people who showed up with great work and fit our culture. We had a common dream, and we had people that we knew who shared that dream and who helped us bring it to life.” One important person they knew was Nizan Guanaes, the head of Grupo ABC, a Brazilian conglomerate and one of the twenty largest media companies in the world. Many years before, Guanaes had hired and mentored Geoff’s partner Mauro. Once plans for DOJO were finalized, they went to Guanaes, made their pitch, and Grupo ABC agreed to bankroll the new shop, writing them a substantial check to get started. “It was definitely through a relationship,” Geoff says. “I don’t really believe in the old boys’ network, so let’s just say it was an old boys’ network but not the way it’s typically been done. The old boys’ network is being reinvented.”
Since 2008, the current recession has cost the advertising industry over 200,000 jobs. During that same recession, DOJO has more than doubled in size, g
rowing from fifteen to forty full-time employees. It recently expanded to a second floor in its San Francisco headquarters and opened satellite offices in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, and in New York City—right on Madison Avenue. In August of 2011, the agency was awarded the global launch campaign for GoogleTV.
A year after taking his position at McCann-Erickson, Vann Graves was promoted to oversee the agency’s global account for Coca-Cola. And in September of 2011, he was promoted to executive vice president and executive creative director, making him the highest ranking black creative in the history of the agency. And so the next kid coming up behind him won’t have to backtrack as much as he did, Vann established the R. Vann Graves Endowed Scholarship for students at Howard University seeking a career in advertising.
“What I have learned,” Vann says, “is that advertising is a blood sport. It’s business savvy, and it’s politics. It hasn’t been easy, by no means. I’ve taken my lumps, and I’m sure I’ll take a lot more. But I’d rather take my lumps because I stayed in the game. I know I cannot walk around my agency saying it’s the white man’s fault I didn’t sell a piece of work, or that I didn’t get an ‘A’ because Tanner got an ‘A.’ It doesn’t work anymore.
“I wish I could say that I was some magically talented guy, but the truth is just that I had a handful of people who wanted me to succeed. If people like Phil Dusenberry and June Baloutine hadn’t reached out to me, I wouldn’t be in this industry. I was lucky that people saw me and said, ‘Hey, Vann’s someone who can make us look good beyond his race. But he’s black, so that helps us, too—and he doesn’t scare us.’
“Advertising is still about what goes on in the room, me selling you something. And for me to get inside that room, I have to speak your language. I have to make you feel comfortable with my being black. I have that extra piece of real estate to carry. The minute you’re uncomfortable with my race, my forward motion stops, which kills it for the next black person coming behind me, too. Once you’re not walking around on eggshells, then I have a chance. That’s the whole premise of the old boys’ club. ‘This guy’s got my back.’ But I have to work extra hard to show you that I got your back. That’s really what it comes down to. That’s the only way to do it.”
In 1986, Roy Eaton returned to classical concert performance at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. From there he toured Europe, South America, Asia, and Russia, and produced four albums, one an international bestseller. In January of 2010, he was inducted into the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame. In his acceptance speech, Eaton recounted the time Y&R’s Charlie Feldman flew out to Utah to help him recover from a coma after his wife had died, suggesting that perhaps what the industry really needs is more friends like Charlie Feldman. Eaton then capped off the evening with a performance of Frédéric Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu. When he finished, nobody asked him what was black about it.
“Ultimately,” Eaton says, “the solution has to come from the level—the only level—that is of any significance, and that is the consciousness with which we view this world. It goes beyond these surface things of a white agency or a black agency, integrated or not. These things are just flotsam and jetsam, coming from a root-level malaise in the value system of the nation. That is where the change has to occur.”
[PART 4]
CANAAN
[1]
The Race That Prays Together
In the early spring of 1964, on a quiet Sunday morning during Lent, Wallace Belson went to church. Belson, a black man, lived in the town of Grand Coteau, which sits just west of the Atchafalaya Swamp in the heart of Acadiana—southern Louisiana’s Cajun Country. Like many of the quaint farming towns you’ll find tucked away in the wetlands of the Mississippi River Delta, Grand Coteau could have been pulled straight from the sketchbook of a Hollywood set designer: weathered old wooden buildings with high-pitched tin roofs nestled under sagging canopies of live oak. The name Grand Coteau translates from the original French as “big ridge.” The town sits atop what, around here, qualifies as high ground, fifty-six feet above sea level. But in spite of its big name, this town is actually very small. Its population, then as now, hovers just above a thousand full-time residents, most of whom profess the same Roman Catholic faith. In 1964, Grand Coteau wasn’t even big enough to support a single traffic light, yet it was home to two separate and distinct Catholic parishes.
The first of these was the Church of the Sacred Heart. First incorporated in 1819 under the name St. Charles Borromeo, it was the seventeenth Catholic parish established in the state of Louisiana. In 1879, the parish replaced its original, modest building with a new one, one that its congregants hoped to be “worthy of Almighty God.” Plans for the new church—drawn up by a prominent New Orleans architect and blessed by the pope himself—laid out a stately, whitewashed, wood-frame building in the Greek Revival style. Adorning its roof was an elegant belfry of a type not commonly seen in North American churches. Inside, ornate frescoes, stained glass, and intricate woodwork gave it an atmosphere more like the classical churches of Europe than what you’d expect to see in a small Southern town. The church itself was set at the end of a picturesque alley of oak trees draped in Spanish moss. Today, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The other parish, Christ the King, was incorporated in 1931, and its main church was built in 1942. Unlike its stately neighbor a mere three hundred yards away, Christ the King was a simple, redbrick box. It did not sit at the end of a grand oak alley, but on a circular drive just off the road. It had no architectural pedigree, nor any slot on any national registers, yet it was historically important in its own right. The black citizens of Grand Coteau had built it with their own hands, laid every brick, cut and sanded every pew. It was the sanctuary they made for themselves in a time that offered them no other. Even their own faith refused to welcome them just up the road.
Blacks were not allowed at Sacred Heart. Wallace Belson was about to get a very harsh reminder of this, because on that quiet Sunday morning in 1964, he went to the wrong church. He walked down the long oak alley, up the front steps, opened the door to the white church, and went inside. Upon seeing a black man enter, two white men left their pews, went over, and confronted him in the vestibule. Then they started beating him. Right there in church. Dropped him to the floor, kicked him in the head, the back, again and again, then threw him out the door and down the steps into the parking lot below.
All of this took place while the other congregants sat in their pews and looked on, saying and doing nothing.
It was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s constant lament that Sunday morning at eleven o’clock was the most segregated hour in the country, but it’s hard to imagine how our divided country could have kept holy the Sabbath any other way. Given the pivotal role Christianity played in sanctioning and promoting slavery, it seems a wonder that black Americans would subscribe to it at all. But God’s Holy Bible is a funny thing. For a supposedly sacred, infallible text, it reads a lot like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. Just flip through and pick whichever story line suits your needs. While the slaveholders built their economy on Leviticus, the slaves found hope in Exodus. “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt,” said the Lord. “I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers.… So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the land of the Canaanites.…”
Through faith in God, the slaves would be delivered from bondage, through the wilderness, and into the Promised Land. This was a Christianity they could get behind, and one they sorely needed. The native religious traditions of Africa had been deliberately destroyed by Southern slave society; tribes and families were torn apart by white masters in order to sever the common bonds of language and culture and folklore that might help the slaves unite. Fragments of those traditions survived, however, and synthesized with the Christianity of the New World.
Protestant hymns met African rhythms and became Negro spirituals, laying the foundation for a style of worship totally distinct from that of the white European church.
In the North and in larger cities, free blacks began forming their own Baptist and Methodist congregations as early as the 1790s. In 1816 in Philadelphia, blacks broke from the main Methodist hierarchy and organized the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, America’s first fully independent black denomination. In the antebellum South, both Catholic and Protestant slaveholders were encouraged to Christianize their slaves. Many did, but feared (quite rightly) that religion would give slaves the means and the motive to rebel. Southern states passed strict laws compelling slaves to meet and worship only under the watchful gaze of white ministers. But the hunger for physical and spiritual freedom would not be so easily contained. Slave religion went underground, becoming “the invisible church.” Away from the plantation house, under cover of darkness, slaves met in secret, learning to read from the Bible, passing on tales of Moses and the Promised Land and plotting their escape.
When the Civil War finally brought America to a reckoning, the country broke in half. The Protestant Church shattered into a million little pieces. Sect after sect, it fractured along the fault lines of geography and race. The Southern Baptists seceded from the American Baptists. The Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Lutherans all established Confederate franchises as well. After Reconstruction, those Southern offshoots fiercely embraced the turnabout to segregationist theology that laid the foundation for Jim Crow: where God had once ordained slavery because blacks were naturally submissive, he now ordained apartheid because blacks were inherently dangerous.
