Race and Advertising [index]

Blackwelder, Julia Kirk.  Styling Jim Crow: African-American Beauty Training during Segregation.  College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2003.

Boime, Albert.  The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century.  Washington DC: Smithsonian, 1990.

Brooks, Dwight E.  "Consumer Markets and Consumer Magazines: Black America and the Culture of Consumption,1920-1960." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1991.

Chambers, Jason.  “Equal in Every Way: African- Americans, Consumption and Materialism from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement.”  Advertising and Society Review 7:1 (2006).

Chambers, Jason.  Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

DeSantis, Alan Douglas.  "Selling the American Dream: The Chicago Defender and the Great Migration of 1915-1919." PhD dissertation, University of Indiana, 1993.

Dolan, Mark K. “Extra!  Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South from Afar.” Southern Cultures 13 (Fall 2007): 106–24.

Edwards, Paul K.  The Southern Urban Negro as Consumer.  New York: Prentice Hall, 1932.

Kern-Foxworth, Marilyn.  Aunt Jemina, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Kinlock Sewell, Stacy.  “The ‘Not-Buying Power’ of the Black Community: Urban Boycotts and Equal Employment Opportunity, 1960-1964.”  Journal of African-American History 89:2 (Spring 2004): 135-151.

Goings, Kenneth.  Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

O'Barr, William M.  Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising.  Boulder: Westview Press, 1994.

        O'Barr, of Duke University, provides a basic instruction manual for reading the subtextual messages related to race and "otherness" in advertising.  Employing Marxist and semiotic theory, he argues that advertisements contain representations of ideology and power relationships in addition to their intended commercial messages.  This secondary discourse instructs readers or viewers with conceptions of hierarchy, dominance and subordination, the ultimate meaning of which is determined by the individuals who encounter them.  Because advertisements often employ stereotypes or present images out of context, representations contained in them are typically inaccurate and tend to lead viewers to construct meanings along preconceived, and often biased, ideas.  The book uses examples from history and contemporary advertising.  Heavily illustrated with black and white reproductions of many advertisements.

Jackson, Peter.  "Black Male: Advertising and the Cultural Politics of Masculinity."  Gender, Place, and Culture 1:4 (1994): 49-59.

Lacy, S.  "The Advertising Content of African American Newspapers."  Journalism Quarterly 71:3 (1994): 521-530.

Leslie, Michael.  "Slow Fade to ?: Advertising in Ebony Magazine." Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 72 (Summer 1995): 426-436.

McKaffy, Marilyn M.  "Advertising Race/Racing Advertising: The Feminine Consumer (Nation), 1876-1900."  Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23:1 (1997): 131-174.

Manring, M.M.  Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.

Meyer, Carter J., and Diana Royer, eds.  Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures.  Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001.

Morgan, Jo-Ann.  "African-American Women in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture."  PhD dissertation, University of California-Los Angeles, 1997.

Moss, Janice Ward.  The History and Advancement of African Americans in the Advertising Industry, 1895-1999.  Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.

Pieterse, Jan P.  White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Rooks, Noliwe M.  Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African-American Women.  New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Ruffins, F. Davis.  "Reflecting on Ethnic Imagery in the Landscape of Commerce" in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, Susan Strasser, et.al., eds.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Swenson, Jill D.  "African-Americans and Advertising: Race and Representation in U.S. History." Communication Quarterly 43:3 (Summer 1996): 395.

Walker, Susannah.  Style & Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920–1975.  Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

Walker, Susannah. “Black Dollar Power: Assessing African American Consumerism since 1945,” in African American Urban History since World War II, ed. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Weems, Jr., Robert E.  Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century.  New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Weems, Robert E., Jr. “African American Consumers since World War II,” in African American Urban History since World War II, ed. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.