Pitch Black: The Best Black Ads of the Past 50+ Years (PB) (2026)

What if the most influential architects of modern American pop culture weren't the ad men of Mad Men, but the unsung Black creatives who built their own ad agencies in the shadows of Jim Crow?

"Pitch Black: The best Black ads of the past 50+ years, " a new book by author and advertising luminary, Mark Robinson, is destined to challenge what you think you know about American business, fashion and culture. "Pitch Black," chronicles a pivotal chapter in America's Civil Rights movement.

"Pitch Black" reveals how advertising created by Black people and for Black people became one of the most effective tools - and weapons - of the Civil Rights movement, changing the world's perception of Black America. Advertising enabled America to get to know Black people in ways that would have been impossible otherwise.

"Pitch Black" is a remarkable collection that cannot be found in any other book, library, or museum. Interspersed between chapters of historical narration, the book showcases the advertising images for each of the five decades of the past 50 years and chronicles a previously unrecorded chapter of the history of American business, fashion and culture. They reveal how Black identity, in all its freshness and different beauty, turned Blackness into a "brand" that America wanted to buy.

The book examines the history of Black America from a previously unexplored perspective.