Beginning in the 1970s, Newport marketed heavily to a black audience, and years of targeted advertising are still paying off
During the 1950s, the White Sentinel , a white supremacist publication, urged a boycott of Philip Morris for having the worst race-mixing record of any large company in the nation. Philip Morris was first in the tobacco industry to hire Negroes instead of Whites for executive and sales positions, the publication lamented, and the first cigarette company to advertise in the Negro press. Indeed, Philip MorrisAmericas top cigarette maker and part of Altria Groupled the way in making tobacco companies charitable pillars of black cultural, educational, and political organizations
One master-case contains 50 boxes, each box has 200 cigarette tubes
They began to run commercials in the 1960s with Black athletes, particularly Elston Howard of the New York Yankees, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, all selling these products, said Gardiner, who wrote the most comprehensive study on the tobacco industrys advertising efforts in Black communities
Proctor quotes a 1970 Lorillard marketing memo that offers an incredibly racist answer to the documents title question, Why Menthols? Negroes, as the story goes, are said to be possessed by an almost genetic body odor