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Introduction The most difficult and bewildering thing about the white world is that it acts as if blacks were not there. —James Baldwin In the early 1990s, Kay Lorraine, a Chicago-based advertising producer, assembled a cast and crew on location to film a commercial for a Cleveland grocery chain. She hired a multiracial cast to reflect Cleveland’s diversity, but the client representative, after seeing the black actors at the taping, ‘‘had a fit and wanted them off the set.’’ Lorraine refused. After several tense moments, he relented. ‘‘O.K.,’’ he allowed, ‘‘they can push the shopping carts around in the back, but make sure they don’t touch the food.’’ So Lorraine filmed the commercial with the black actors in the back of the scene and not touching any of the products— quietly pretending that they were not there.1 Although Lorraine’s encounter with a prejudiced executive took place late in the twentieth century, it could have happened in nearly any decade and in any place in America. For much of the century, to include African Americans in a commercial, even one aired in a city with a large black population, was anathema to many executives. Indeed, many of the people who decided the advertising and marketing direction for their companies simply acted as though blacks did not exist as consumers for their products. Therefore, they often gave them no place in their advertising, unless individuals like Lorraine, black consumers, or advocacy groups pressured them to do so. Lorraine risked losing the account when she openly confronted the representative’s prejudice. Advertising is a service business. Agencies exist to meet the needs of clients and those clients have complete power over where their advertising dollars go. That Lorraine, a white woman, took this stand was due in part to the hard work of numerous African Americans in the advertising and media industries. Over the course of several decades, these men and women stood up to the negative and 2 Introduction denigrating treatment by advertising agencies and American corporations , and their hard work helped make the black consumer market visible . As this examination of the advertising industry will show, too few others acted with Lorraine’s courage to include blacks in advertisements —or as employees in advertising agencies. Yet it was only through this sort of pressure that the advertising industry ever changed at all. The struggle of African Americans for inclusion in the advertising industry is the central concern of this book: it connects the growing visibility of African Americans in advertisements with the increasing presence and hard work of African American advertising professionals. African Americans, both inside and outside the advertising industry, viewed advertising as an employment and financial opportunity and as a mechanism to effect cultural change in both the white and black communities . They actively engaged in defining the black consumer both for potential clients and for blacks themselves. They used advertising not only to promote images of consumption but also, within the advertisements , to promote positive images of black life and culture, from family life and academic achievement to religion and community. Scholars like Marilyn Kern-Foxworth and Anthony Cortese have examined changes in blacks’ representation in advertisements, documenting the transition from negative and disparaging stereotypes, through their virtual invisibility in advertisements, to the beginnings of genuine and realistic representations. But no one has fully explored the breadth of changes in the racial makeup of the agency world responsible for those advertisements. In fact, beyond a few brief references in historical works, scholars have ignored the experiences of black professionals in the advertising industry. In doing so, they have turned existing histories of the advertising industry into a story of white men and women only, and they have created the dangerous and inaccurate impression that African Americans have not fought for inclusion in this industry. This work shows that blacks contested discrimination in advertising employment much as they did in more recognized areas like politics, law, and manufacturing . Further, existing histories imply that the industry’s racial homogeneity was simply a reflection of larger society, the result of a lack of interest from blacks or the absence of talented blacks. This work documents a history of active, systemic discrimination.2 It also documents the history of the pioneering African Americans who transformed the advertising industry in the face of that discrimination . It offers a broad historical examination of blacks’ struggle for work in an industry that did not welcome...

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