Some of My Best Friends Are Black (29 page)

In April of 1963, just as the Children’s Crusade was laying siege to the segregated department stores of downtown Birmingham, America’s three largest civil rights groups, the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), had all converged on New York in an attempt to break through the color line on Madison Avenue. At the time, after nearly two decades of sustained postwar economic growth, 55 percent of blacks in America lived below the poverty line, blacks made fifty-three cents to every dollar that whites made, and over 10 percent of blacks were unemployed, nearly double the rate for the general population. A path into the American workplace had to be found.

On April 22, 1963,
Advertising Age
released the results of a three-year study done by the Urban League on employment practices at the ten largest ad agencies in New York City. It showed that out of some twenty thousand employees, only twenty-five blacks held positions in any kind of creative or managerial capacity. Of those twenty-five, like Clarence Holte at BBDO, many were consigned to work exclusively on the Negro market, which the Urban League denounced as a form of “internal segregation.”

Finally called to account for their years of discrimination, advertising executives tried to fend off protests, trotting out one excuse after the next. It was the clients, agencies said, who didn’t want blacks in their ads or associated with their products. Moreover, there simply weren’t any black applicants out there to choose from. This was not entirely false. In the early 1960s, the best minds of the civil rights generation weren’t going into business; they were going into law, politics, government, and teaching,
professions that they saw as part of the freedom struggle. And of those blacks who were blazing trails in corporate America, few even considered advertising—its reputation for discrimination was just that bad. Ad agencies didn’t hire black people because black people didn’t apply to ad agencies because ad agencies didn’t hire black people.

And advertising already had too many white people. Despite its ubiquitous presence in our lives, advertising is a small industry. In 1962, the six biggest agencies received some twenty-three thousand applications, four times as many candidates as they had employees, let alone job openings; there just weren’t a whole lot of vacancies to fill. To give every ad agency proportional black representation top to bottom in 1963 would have required just a few hundred jobs total. But what the agencies didn’t get, at first, was that this wasn’t only about jobs. It was a fight to control the cultural narrative of the country.

Advertising distorts and amplifies culture. It’s a fun-house mirror. It takes ideas and images out of our real lives, exaggerates them for comic or dramatic effect, and then reflects them back to us. Susie Homemaker and Aunt Jemima—the perfect housewife and the loyal help—were part of the same distorted depiction of aspirational upper-middle-class status. Both were cartoons, and both needed to go if America was going to get its head right. Civil rights leaders wanted advertising to show that all consumers were created equal. They wanted Madison Avenue to buy the world a Coke and teach it how to sing. The boys on Madison Avenue had no idea what they were talking about.

Most of corporate America was white in those days, certainly, but advertising was white on a whole different level, so white that there were shades of white in its whiteness. The industry was tribal, incestuous. It was territory you couldn’t hope to navigate if you weren’t already a member. The biggest agencies, like J. Walter Thompson, McCann-Erickson, and Young & Rubicam, were filled with the scions of the WASPy East Coast establishment. Certain Ivy League grads gathered here, others gathered there. The Irish Catholics had carved out a niche at BBDO. Jews worked at Grey. If there was an outlier, it was the young, scrappy DDB—Doyle Dane Bernbach, Irish and Jewish with a few Italians starting to filter in to the creative ranks.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1963, activists laid siege to Madison Avenue with picket marches and demonstrations. By August, agency executives had agreed to sit down for talks with the NAACP. And in November, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins was invited to give the keynote at that year’s annual conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4A’s), the industry’s largest trade organization. At the convention, Wilkins gave a stirring speech on the damage done by advertising’s depictions of, and discrimination against, black Americans. Following his address, Madison Avenue promised to take action.

They took out an ad.

On November 11, 1963, the 4A’s took out a full-page in the
New York Times
, sending out “
AN INVITATION TO ALL BRIGHT YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN TO CONSIDER ADVERTISING AS A CAREER
.” Hovering above the headline was an illustration now familiar to modern readers: a group of eager young professionals, with a black man and woman in the mix, looking bright-eyed and professional, just like the white folks. “Diversity advertising” was born.

It was as useless then as it is now. Voluntary measures and “We’ll do better” pledges were used by the industry to stave off pressure from civil rights groups, but it mostly amounted to stonewalling and tokenism. Madison Avenue’s foot-dragging was egregious enough to trigger an investigation by the New York City Commission on Human Rights. Another survey of minority employment in advertising was done. As of August of 1967, out of close to 18,000 employees at several dozen agencies, the commission counted only 635 blacks, most all of them working in the back office or at the clerical or mail room level. Only fifteen were working in any kind of creative, client-facing capacity. Even more damning, close to 40 percent of those black hires were housed in a handful of agencies, the few who had made a sincere effort, which showed that the rest of them weren’t trying at all.

Despite its dim outlook, the NYCCHR report did highlight one important fact: companies that wanted to change, could. Benton & Bowles, where Roy Eaton was now music director, led the industry with 8.5 percent
black employment overall.
*
The award for most-improved went to J. Walter Thompson. In four years, JWT’s New York office had gone from 0.6 percent black to 4.9 percent black. At the behest of the agency’s chairman, JWT had made a sincere, forward-leaning effort. Partnering with civil rights groups, they went out and found the black candidates who couldn’t be found. They recruited from black colleges and publicized job openings in black media. A special training program was created to groom clerical hires for professional positions. Management made a decision, and it got done.

Black employees were also encouraged to recruit and recommend any qualified candidates they might know personally. Bring your friends. If you can’t beat the old boys’ network, start making one.

The old boys’ network has proven to be nothing if not resilient. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which outlawed discrimination in companies applying for government contracts during the buildup to World War II. In August of 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10479, which established the Government Contract Committee to oversee the enforcement of Executive Order 8802, since few companies had bothered to pay it much mind. Almost ten years later, in March of 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925, which, again, outlawed discrimination by government contractors based on race, creed, color, or national origin. Kennedy called for “affirmative action” to be taken, not for racial preference, but to ensure that purposeful discrimination would be rooted out.

It wasn’t. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Title VI of the bill (one more time, for good measure) outlawed discrimination in government contracting. Title VII went one step further and outlawed discrimination among all private employers as well—a bold reach, considering how little the law had done to stop discrimination in government contracting thus far. Title VII also established
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a federal agency to enforce all of the above, seeing as how, to date, no one ever had. Then, in September of 1965, Johnson rolled out Executive Order 11246, which outlawed discrimination in government contracts worth more than $10,000 per year, because, somehow, that wasn’t covered when discrimination in
all
government contracts was outlawed in Executive Orders 8802, 10479, 10925, and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act passed just one year before. Through all this, between 1962 and 1967, in at least twenty-two of America’s fifty states, black employment either remained stagnant or declined.

Same as it did with demands for fair housing, America responded with the right laws and lots of committees and panels, but the authority vested in those entities was laughable in the larger context of the problem. Like HUD, the EEOC was empowered only to engage in “conference, conciliation, and persuasion” with offending companies, or recommend them to the Justice Department for prosecution. Shortly after its forming, the EEOC was flooded with more than forty-four thousand discrimination complaints. Only nine hundred of them were ever brought to trial.

In March of 1968, after the results of its investigation into Madison Avenue were published, the NYCCHR dragged all the agency heads back in front of the cameras for several days of hearings. More excuses were given, more promises made. “We’re overreacting to this Negro thing,” one exec was overheard saying to another. “It’ll go away.” Which more or less captured the industry’s attitude toward the whole affair. Why get bent out of shape? The most severe penalty the commission could threaten them with was a five-hundred-dollar fine.

Two months after the hearings, the NYCCHR filed suit against the two worst-offending agencies to make examples of them, and Madison Avenue finally got off its ass—and not because of the five hundred dollars. In the weeks between the hearings and the charges, Martin Luther King had been murdered, and over a hundred of America’s cities had broken out in riots. After two decades of “progress,” the material well-being of the average black citizen had barely improved. The unrest that came in the wake of King’s death made it plain that this wasn’t a Watts problem, a Newark problem, or a Detroit problem. It was systemic, and it
was bad for business. Riots stopped construction. Man-hours were lost. Property was damaged. Worst of all, terrified shoppers and their wallets stayed home, and anytime Americans aren’t spending money they don’t have on stuff they don’t need, the world’s largest economy grinds to a halt. The black revolution had finally hit the only nerve that really mattered: the bottom line.

Miraculously, after decades of “not being able to find” qualified black employees, America was on a hiring binge. Some companies were way out in front. Spurred by the 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit, execs from Alcoa, Chase Manhattan Bank, and dozens of other companies had formed the Urban Coalition, calling for an “all-out attack on urban unemployment.” The King riots sent those efforts into overdrive. By the end of 1968, the
New York Times
reported that a list of companies running minority outreach programs would probably run “just about as long” as the listing of the New York Stock Exchange itself.

Madison Avenue was late to the party. Advertising is not a business that deals directly with the public. It has no stores to burn, no products to boycott, making it slow to absorb the full implications of “this Negro thing.” By the time the agencies went looking, there weren’t any black people left. After the Fortune 500 scramble, pretty much every black person in America who would have been qualified to work in advertising was already sitting behind a desk somewhere else. Officials at the Urban League even admitted as much: all the college-educated, white-collar candidates were spoken for. And entry-level salaries in advertising were so low that it was impossible to lure candidates away from jobs they had already taken. In a twist, young black professionals started turning the agencies down, because they were already making twice as much at Xerox or General Mills.

The legal and public pressure on the agencies, meanwhile, had only intensified. No more tokenism and no more stonewalling. And despite the hiring crunch, the NAACP and the Urban League were emphatic that the agencies not hire unqualified candidates, as low-performing employees would only exacerbate existing stereotypes. So as the 1960s drew to a close, Madison Avenue was stuck at the bottom of a sad little hole it had dug for itself. Under the threat of government sanction and public
reprisal, the agencies had to hire black employees, but could hire only qualified black employees, even though there were no qualified black employees—and they had to do it now.