Until now, most works on the history of African Americans in advertising have focused on the depiction of blacks in advertisements. Madison Avenue and the Color Line breaks new ground by examining the history of black advertising agency employees and agency owners.

Madison Avenue and the Color Line
African Americans in the Advertising Industry

Jason Chambers

328 pages | 6 x 9 | 18 illus.
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4047-4 | $39.95s | £26.00 | Add to shopping cart
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Until now, most works on the history of African Americans in advertising have focused on the depiction of blacks in advertisements. As the first comprehensive examination of African American participation in the industry, Madison Avenue and the Color Line breaks new ground by examining the history of black advertising employees and agency owners.

For much of the twentieth century, even as advertisers chased African American consumer dollars, the doors to most advertising agencies were firmly closed to African American professionals. Over time, black participation in the industry resulted from the combined efforts of black media, civil rights groups, black consumers, government organizations, and black advertising and marketing professionals working outside white agencies. Blacks positioned themselves for jobs within the advertising industry, especially as experts on the black consumer market, and then used their status to alter stereotypical perceptions of black consumers. By doing so, they became part of the broader effort to build an African American professional and entrepreneurial class and to challenge the negative portrayals of blacks in American culture.

Using an extensive review of advertising trade journals, government documents, and organizational papers, as well as personal interviews and the advertisements themselves, Jason Chambers weaves individual biographies together with broader events in U.S. history to tell how blacks struggled to bring equality to the advertising industry.

"A major contribution to the history of advertising, consumption, and African American history. I was particularly struck by Chambers's argument that the fate of blacks in the advertising industry depended deeply on external events—whether the integrationism of the early civil rights movement, the government activism of the Great Society, or the anger of the urban riots."—Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic

"The book offers perspective for those entering the industry as well as those that don't understand what all of the fuss is about."—Advertising Age

Jason Chambers teaches advertising at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an advertising consultant.

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