Though everyone recognizes the 7-Up can and the ViewMaster 3D toy, hardly anyone is aware of their role in the country’s long struggle for racial equality. The fact is that the hands that designed these two American icons were black.
It is a fact that, curiously enough, is not even well known within the design community. Victor Margolin, who has taught design history at the University of Illinois at Chicago for nearly 20 years, decided to do something about this historical oversight.
“I started to look for material on black designers,” he said, “but I found very little.”
Margolin’s frustration led to a major research project on the African-American contribution to commercial and industrial design in Chicago. Now, a year later, with a grant from the university’s Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, some additional financial help from the school’s College of Architecture and the Arts and from the African-American Cultural Center, the result is the symposium, “African-American Designers: The Chicago Experience, Then and Now.”
The symposium, the first ever to focus on black industrial designers, advertising artists, cartoonists, illustrators, graphic designers and product designers will be held Saturday at the DuSable Museum of African-American History, 740 E. 56th Place, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. There is a registration fee of $15.
The symposium will delve into the complex political and social history of blacks designing for whites, blacks designing for blacks, blacks hired by whites to design for blacks, and so forth.
Just about the time Margolin began his research, Eugene Winslow, an African-American graphic designer and editorial cartoonist who began studying and working in Chicago in the mid-1940s, donated his papers to UIC. Winslow, now retired, saved everything he did throughout his career, from high school drawings on. This collection became the foundation of an archive on African-American designers at UIC.
Margolin discovered an even earlier pioneer in Charles Dawson, a 1917 graduate of the School of the Art Institute. In the 1920s and ’30s, Dawson worked on the city’s South Side creating advertising for black-owned businesses such as the Victory Life Insurance Co. and the Poro Schools of Beauty Culture. Anthony Overton, an early black businessman in Chicago, was a patron of graphic design for his businesses, which included High Brown Face Powder and Victory Life.
Cartoonists offered other examples of early black commercial artists. Margolin studied early African-American newspapers such as the Globe, the Whip and the Bee. In the Chicago Defender he found the cartoons of Jay Jackson, Chester Commodore and others. He discovered Art Institute grad E. Simms Campbell who, before ending his career in Europe, created the little mustachioed man Esky, who for many years was the logo of Esquire magazine.
Margolin’s research took on a face and a memory when he met Chuck Harrison, 68, a product designer. The broad strokes of Harrison’s professional life would be repeated time after time as Margolin met more and more black commercial artists.
“I was just 16, so I probably shouldn’t have been in college,” Harrison recalls. “But I was — at City College of San Francisco. I was advised to change my major from economics to art. I had never had any interest in art, but I took the classes and got good grades, and I felt good about it.”
When it came time for him to move on from a two- to a four-year college, Harrison decided he’d major in industrial design. At the time, degrees were offered at only a few schools, including the one that accepted him, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 1954, after graduation, he was hired by an interior designer here, Maurice Sternberg, to design custom furniture. In the history of black design in Chicago, many a first break for a young artist came from someone in the Jewish community.
One instance was Tom Miller who, for 33 years, worked for Morton Goldsholl Associates, a leading design firm here. In the 1970s, Miller played a key role in the redesign of 7-Up’s packaging, changing the logo, rescaling the typeface and introducing a bubble background on bottles, cans, cartons and truck signage.
Generally, though, Margolin said, “The opportunities for black designers in the ’50s were almost nil. Remember, design has a social element — meetings, lunches. Though some blacks worked in the back rooms, when it came time for lunch with the client, the white principal went.”
Leroy Winbush remembers those days. “I could tell stories,” he says. Instead he prefers to recall the triumphs. When he was art director at Goldblatt’s, he noted, he had a staff of 60, all white.
“Oh, every now and then,” he says, “something would remind me of racial things, but I never let that bother me. I grew up in a white neighborhood and grew up the right way, without prejudice.”
Winbush graduated from Englewood High School and immediately began work as an apprentice in a sign shop. Later he would do the theater fronts for the Regal Theater, working out of a shop underneath the stage. His resume would grow: three years with NBC, 10 with Ebony magazine, design director for the Illinois sesquicentennial, designer of windows for virtually all the banks in the city, starting with the American National Bank in 1947.
Winbush worked through what might be thought of as the bad old days, through the civil-rights era, and at 84, he remains in business. Though he was more successful than most black designers in being accepted by the white business world, it took him seven attempts to be made a member of the influential Chicago Art Directors’ Club. In time, he became its president.
Product designer Harrison worked at a series of firms: Ed Klein, Henry P. Glass, Robert Podall. He also freelanced for Sears, where he at one point asked about a full-time position. In the draft for his autobiography, “Contribute What You Can,” he writes: “We were midway through the hiring process when (Harrison’s contact there) came to me, very embarrassed, with the news that he couldn’t hire me because Sears had an unwritten policy against hiring blacks as executives.”
In 1958, Sawyer Manufacturing Co. came to Podall wanting its popular stereo viewer, the ViewMaster, a favorite of kids everywhere, to be redesigned. “I was asked to make it less expensive, more comfortable for the customer to use, easier to build,” Harrison said.
“For the first 15 years of my career I never met or even heard of another black industrial designer,” he said. “Then I saw an article in Ebony about a man out East, named Noel Mayo. I went right home and called him. We’re still friends.”
Margolin pointed out that, difficult as it might have been here, opportunities for black commercial artists in Chicago were greater than almost anywhere else, with the possible exception of New York.
“First,” he said, “there was a large population of African-Americans and, on the South Side, a concentration of black businesses going back to the ’20s. In 1933, the World’s Fair here had some black design presence. At the same time, there was the African and American Negro Exhibition held in the National Pythian Temple on the South Side. In 1941, the South Side Community Arts Center was started and continues today. With Works Progress Administration backing, it offered classes, exhibits, discussions. In 1942, Johnson publishing was founded.
“From the turn of the century, black students — not many but some — were accepted at the School of the Art Institute,” Margolin said. “Other blacks interested in design went to the New Bauhaus, which, in the ’50s, became part of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
“In the ’40s and ’50s, a group of black photographers emerged, some of them commercial photographers.”
By the 1960s, an awareness of a potentially lucrative African-American market brought calls for black designers, copywriters and allied trades to pitch products to a black audience. This gave rise to what Margolin calls “The Black Designer,” someone who was called in when there was a project about African-Americans. Winbush, for example, was summoned by the Museum of Science and Industry to design an exhibit on Sickle Cell Anemia. An African-American ad agency, Vince Cullars Advertising Inc., was tapped by Lorillard Tobacco Co. to make its cigarettes appealing to Chicago’s black community.
In 1961, Harrison got a call from his contact at Sears. “They said they could hire me then,” Harrison said, “and I said, `I don’t need you anymore.’ “
But the more he thought about it, the more he thought he might like to work for a big corporation. He hired on as Sears’ first black executive and stayed 32 years.
“I designed thousands of things,” he recalled, “hair dryers, fish tanks, hearing aids, lawn mowers, sewing machines, garbage cans. My thought was always to make life better for people.”
Harrison and Winbush and Cullars will be part of the symposium, on a panel of pioneers. Margolin hopes that such projects will help “to create a much more socially complex narrative of design’s history than we presently have, a narrative that is comparable to the complexities of narratives in other areas such as the history of (blacks in) politics, literature or music.”
