Despite this pedigree, the magazine did not survive into the third quarter of 1961. As far as Mr. Lewis understands, the only copies of it that exist today are those on the table of his living room in the TriBeCa building he bought in 1990. A while back someone he knew found copies at a yard sale on Martha’s Vineyard and sold them to him.
The masthead identified him as “director of community relations,” which meant that he was out in the world trying to solicit advertising, a failed exercise, despite his efforts. “We had the most prominent and talented writers and creatives and a deserving audience. But we could not generate any support from mainstream ad agencies,” he said. “We never got one paid ad in three issues.”
Still, his belief in his own ability to influence was unwavering. After he left the military in the 1950s, Mr. Lewis returned to New York and got a job as a social worker, which was common for young Black men and women with creative aspirations because it was paying daytime work that was available to them. Mr. Lewis’s territory was the Lower East Side, which left him dealing with people from a range of backgrounds — Black families, but also Jewish families, Italian families and Latino families. “There were no men in any of these households,” Mr. Lewis said. “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 unlike 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 very different than it was when The Urbanite first appeared on newsstands. Mr. Lewis got his seed money from a group of white Wall Street investors. “The Kennedys had been killed and there was a lot of white guilt and the sense among white people that they had to do something — that there had been this moment of hope and now it was gone,” Mr. Lewis said.
If the overarching goal of advertising is to separate people from their money, here and among other Black agencies newly forming in New York and Chicago, the ambitions were broader and implicitly political. For the entirety of the 20th century, advertising had relied on a debased image of Black life to sell things to white people who held all the presumed market power. As Jason Chambers, a historian, argued in his book “Madison Avenue and the Color Line,’’ images of Black people serving moneyed white peoplevisibly upheld the assumed social organization of everyday life. Stereotypes amplified and justified discrimination, so the challenge for Mr. Lewis and others working alongside 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 clients like Smirnoff vodka. Corporations faced internal pressures to change, and they sought the voices of Black marketers. By the early 1970s, some of that enthusiasm had faded. “The bloom is definitely off the rose,” Mr. Lewis told the The New York Times in 1974.
What saved the agency, in part, was a deal he made with Quaker Oats to sponsor a radio soap opera called “Sounds of the City.” The story revolved around a Black family who fled the segregated South to chase opportunity in Chicago, only to encounter trauma after trauma once they settled into their new lives. Shauneille Perry, a graduate of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and the first cousin of Lorraine Hansberry, served as writer and director.
Credit: Source link