Black heroes of the cola wars
Jonathan Kay
National Post Tuesday, March 13, 2007
The next time you drink a Pepsi, take a moment to think about the role the beverage played in the early days of the civil-rights struggle. Mere sugar water it may be. But in the early 1940s, Pepsi-Cola was one of the only big American companies willing to give blacks a chance to prove themselves as white-collar talent.
The story of the cola wars is taught often as a business-school case study. However, the battle had a fascinating sociological dimension as well. When Pepsi began challenging Coca-Cola in the 1930s, the upstart was decidedly down-market, selling its product in cheap recycled beer bottles instead of Coca-Cola's distinctive glassware. Both drinks cost a nickel.But Pepsi gave buyers 12 ounces while Coca-Cola delivered six, making Pepsi more popular with impoverished labourers and teenagers. Older readers may remember the famous 1939 jingle: Pepsi- Cola hits the spot. Twelve full ounces, that's a lot. Twice as much for a nickel, too. Pepsi- Cola is the drink for you!(Amazingly, most Americans then believed 12 ounces of soda was more than one person could drink at a sitting. Lord knows what they would have made of the 32-oz. supersize servings we now buy in movie theatres and gas stations.)
Pepsi was then by far the smaller operation: In 1939, its sales were US$4.87-million, a drop in the bucket compared to Coca-Cola's US$128-million. Eager to build market share, Walter S. Mack, Jr., who became Pepsi's president in 1938, began reaching out to a demographic that Coca- Cola had largely ignored: America's 13 million blacks. Thus was born Pepsi's "Negro market" team, a specially recruited cadre of black marketing men led by a charismatic National Urban League veteran named Edward F. Boyd.
Boyd's reps traveled the country, visiting African-American Elks Clubs, black mom-and-pop stores, and jitterbug competitions. Their efforts created a profitable niche for Pepsi, one that helped the company survive at a time when it was flirting with bankruptcy.
As Wall Street Journal reporter Stephanie Capparell describes in her new book, The Real Pepsi Challenge, the bald-faced discrimination endured by Boyd's promotions men was appalling. In the Jim Crow South, finding a hotel room was impossible. When they rode in Pullman sleeping cars, conductors would force them to draw their shades lest white passengers complain. At times, Negro-market agents literally put their life on the line for Pepsi: As late as the 1950s, lynchings remained common in many parts of the U.S. South.
Even at Pepsi's own corporate events, racism was evident. Boyd, for instance, felt compelled to bring his wife to internal social functions -- to allay white co-workers' fears that he would ravish their women then and there. In one notorious 1949 speech, Mack himself reportedly exhorted his employees "to give Pepsi a little more status, a little more class [so] it will no longer be known [merely] as a nigger drink."
The black men who carried briefcases for Pepsi in these early days were heroes of a sort. You often hear people talk about the "emergence of a black middle class" in casual tones, as if this sociological stratum sprang into being spontaneously. But of course, it didn't. It happened because people like Boyd made it happen; because they braved the threats, and exceeded the expectations, imposed upon them by a bigoted society.
The world is obviously very different now. Yet our fixation on race continues. The more Western societies drove true racism into extinction, the more obsessed our elites became with rooting out its faint (or even nonexistent) traces through censorship and propaganda. In the 1940s, the fight against racism was symbolized by men such as Boyd and the great Jackie Robinson (who played his first game at Ebbets Field 60 years ago this spring).Today, it is symbolized by the windbags from the United Nations' Geneva- based Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, who last week commanded the Canadian government to expunge the term "visible minorities" from official documents, in favour of some other (unspecified) warm-and-fuzzy euphemism. One good reason to read The Real Pepsi Challenge is to remind us that, until relatively recently, the campaign against racism was a profound life-and-death phenomenon for millions of blacks, not the politically correct farce it's become in the hands of the human rights mandarins who run our universities, government tribunals and NGOs.
Men such as Edward F. Boyd represented the best of the civil-rights struggle: the ideal that individuals should be judged on the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. Sadly, we've turned that noble creed into a cult of collective rights and whiny political correctness. Too bad the original spirit couldn't be put in a bottle and passed around like sugar water. I'd buy that for a nickel.
Jkay@nationalpost.com
Now, if we can set our sites on this silly PC vs. Mac war, my Mac-obsessed friends will see the error of their ways.
