The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business

The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business By Stephanie Capparell Wall Street Journal Books/Free Press, January 2007

Getting black folks to drink soda water was the easy part. Proving that African American executives could succeed as executives in big business was another matter.

In 1947, Pepsi's president, WAter Mack, courageously hired Urban League official Ed Boyd, to start a Negro market group. The salesmen--never more than a dozen--were natty, well-spoken ambassadors who blanketed the country and endured all of Jim Crow's affronts to visit white bottlers as well as black colleges, grocery stores and Elks' Lodges.

The Real Pepsi Challenge departs from the larger corpus of black business books in that it doesn't deal with entrepreneurs such as Bob Johnson in The Billion Dollar BET: Robert Johnson and the Inside Story of Black Entertainment Television (Wiley Books, 2004).

This story has a concomitant quality with another major crusade of the mid-20th century. Rosa Parks was not the first black citizen to challenge segregated public accommodations, just as the Pepsi salesmen were not the first African Americans to quietly storm the corporate bastion. Yet Parks tipped the modern Civil Rights Movement merely by refusing to relinquish a bus seat. In similar fashion, Corporate America finally accepted black executives in an effort to sell a product as unremarkable as sugared water. Some who sold it, however, changed business history. Indeed, last year, PepsiCo Inc. named a woman of color born in India as its chief executive.