Despite this pedigree, the magazine did not survive until the third quarter of 1961. As far as Mr. Lewis understands, the only copies that still exist are those on the table in his living room in the Tribeca building he bought in 1990. Some time ago an acquaintance found copies at a yard sale in Martha’s Vineyard and sold them to her.
Masthead identified him as “director of community relations”, implying that he was trying to solicit advertisements in the world, a failed practice, despite his efforts. “We had the most prominent and talented writers and creators and a worthy audience. But we could not garner any support from mainstream advertising agencies,” he said. “We never found a paid ad in three issues.”
Still, his belief in his ability to impress was unwavering. After leaving the military in the 1950s, Mr. Lewis returned to New York and found a job as a social worker, a practice common to young black men and women with creative aspirations because it paid for the day’s work available to them. was doing. Mr. Lewis’ area was the Lower East Side, which left him working with people from many backgrounds – black families, but also Jewish families, Italian families, and Latino families. “There were no men in any of these houses,” said Mr. Lewis. “They were absent.” So he spent a lot of time talking to women, who were the drivers of the consumer economy. And he spent a lot of time learning to communicate with people who were the opposite of him.
This would put him at an advantage when he finally opened Uniworld in 1969, with the goal of creating ads for major brands – managed and owned by a white ruling class – that would speak to a black audience. By 1969, the country was much different than it was when The Urbanite first appeared on newsstands. Mr. Lewis got his original money from a group of White Wall Street investors. “The Kennedys were killed and there was a lot of white guilt and feeling among white people that they had to do something – that there was this moment of hope and now it is gone,” Lewis said.
If the overarching goal of advertising is to separate people from their money, then here and among other Black agencies that are becoming new in New York and Chicago, the ambitions were broad and implicitly political. For the entirety of the 20th century, advertising relied on a discredited image of black life to sell things to white people who had all the supposed market power. As one historian, Jason Chambers, argues in his book “Madison Avenue and Color Line,The images of black people serving wealthy white people clearly justified the imagined social organization of everyday life. Stereotypes amplified and justified discrimination, so the challenge for Mr. Lewis and others who worked with him was to deliver a countervailing set of positive or simply accurate depictions that would point to black Americans “as equal consumers and equal citizens”. .
In its first few years, Uniworld rode the wave of the ’60s revolution and did well, gaining customers such as Smirnoff Vodka. Corporations faced internal pressures to convert, and they sought the voices of black marketers. By the early 1970s, some of that enthusiasm had faded. “Bloom is certainly far from a rose,” Mr Lewis told The New York Times in 1974.
What saved the agency was a deal made with Quaker Oats to sponsor a radio soap opera called “Sounds of the City”. The story revolves around a black family that flees south in isolation to pursue opportunity in Chicago, only to suffer trauma after trauma once they settle into their new life. A graduate of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and first cousin of Seanil Perry Lorraine HansberryServed as writer and director.