In 1948, Moss Kendrix, a former New Deal public relations officer,
founded a highly successful, Washington, D.C.-based public relations
firm, the flagship client of which was the Coca-Cola Company. As the
first black pitchman for Coca-Cola, Kendrix found his way into the
rarefied world of white corporate America. His personal phone book also
included the names of countless black celebrities, such as bandleader
Duke Ellington, singer-actress Pearl Bailey, and boxer Joe Louis, with
whom he had built relationships in the course of developing marketing
campaigns for his numerous federal and corporate clients. Kendrix, along
with Ebony publisher John H. Johnson and Life photographer Gordon
Parks, recognized that, in the image-saturated world of postwar America,
media in all its forms held greater significance for defining American
citizenship than ever before. For these imagemakers, the visual
representation of African Americans as good citizens was good business.
In Represented, Brenna Wynn Greer explores how black entrepreneurs
produced magazines, photographs, and advertising that forged a close
association between blackness and Americanness. In particular, they
popularized conceptions of African Americans as enthusiastic consumers,
a status essential to postwar citizenship claims. But their media
creations were complicated: subject to marketplace dictates, they often
relied on gender, class, and family stereotypes. Demand for such
representations came not only from corporate and government clients to
fuel mass consumerism and attract support for national efforts, such as
the fight against fascism, but also from African Americans who sought
depictions of blackness to counter racist ideas that undermined their
rights and their national belonging as citizens.
The story of how black capitalists made the market work for racial
progress on their way to making money reminds us that the path to civil
rights involved commercial endeavors as well as social and political
activism.
