1933 marked the end of Prohibition’s 13-year reign in the United States. It was also just the beginning of a period of great upheaval in the country that would go far beyond beer.
After Prohibition’s revocation, there were around 750 breweries left standing in the United States, down from some 1,500 before the 18th Amendment took hold in 1920. By 1973 only 65 remained. The big breweries’ quest to shore up market share meant undercutting smaller operations on price. When the smaller breweries could not keep up with the lower profit margins, and could not match the big breweries on volume, they either went out of business or sold their brands to the same breweries that were putting them out of business.
As beer’s hierarchies shifted over the ensuing decades, so did society’s. The burgeoning Civil Rights Movement was a decades-long struggle led by Black Americans, who called for desegregation and an end to violent discrimination. Equal voting rights and access to schooling were key tenets of the movement, as well as reduced barriers to economic participation. While some leaders in the Black community advocated for more and better-paying jobs, others pushed for entrepreneurship as a cure for Black economic woes.
Against the backdrop of these uprisings and paradigm shifts, a group of Black businessmen from Milwaukee purchased a regional brewery in the majority-white, small Wisconsin city of Oshkosh in 1970. With that, Peoples Brewing Company became the first Black-owned brewery in the state’s history.
Peoples had been founded in 1913 as a rebuke to the monopolistic Oshkosh Brewing Company. The city’s tied house proprietors wanted their fair share of the revenue OBC was hauling in, and decided to join forces in a new cooperative brewing venture for the people—hence the name.
It is fitting, then, that 57 years later, Theodore “Ted” Mack and his fellow Black business associates would purchase Peoples in an effort to establish a brewery for their community. They also hoped to keep the fruits of their labor from going elsewhere. Mack’s desire to own a brewery stemmed from the idea that the Black community should become producers of the goods and services that it consumed—not just another market for white business interests to conquer. He saw that Black people were drinking a great deal of beer, but with little Black involvement in the brewing industry, the money they spent would never be reinvested in the Black community.
He wanted a beer that Black people could call their own. But certain forces were intent on preventing that from happening.
Mack was born in Jim Crow-era Alabama in 1930. Smart and athletic, he had attempted to apply to the University of Alabama in the late 1940s or early 1950s, only to see his application thrown out by the school’s registrar on account of his race.
Although he had several scholarship offers to play football for several Black colleges, he decided instead to join the U.S. Army to serve during the Korean War. After he was discharged, Mack landed a football scholarship at Ohio State University, the first Black athlete from Alabama to be offered one. He transferred to Marquette University in Milwaukee in 1955 and injured his back before he could play in any games. That injury proved fateful, as it changed his life course from one of athletics to one of activism.
Mack graduated from Marquette in 1959—the only African American in his class—with a degree in social work, and went to work for the Milwaukee County Welfare Department. Frustrated by the institutional racism he encountered, and the lack of upward mobility within the county, Mack turned to social and economic activism to try to bring about change for the area’s Black community. He served as chairman for multiple civil rights organizations, organized a bus to attend the 1963 March on Washington, and ran for municipal office twice.
“A group of Black businessmen from Milwaukee purchased a regional brewery in the majority-white, small Wisconsin city of Oshkosh in 1970. With that, Peoples Brewing Company became the first Black-owned brewery in the state’s history.”
“[Ted] was big, blustery, very out front, but smart,” recalls Jan Crosby, widow of Henry Crosby, a business associate of Mack’s. His large, bold personality became a hallmark of Mack’s activism.
The combination of social and economic activism led Mack to believe that business was the way to lift the Black community out of poverty. And that belief led him to an unlikely industry for a Black man in the 1960s to be involved in: brewing.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allowed minorities to file lawsuits against companies based on employment discrimination. This legislation ultimately integrated the brewing industry as well, which was previously overwhelmingly white. Statistics from a 1952 National Urban League survey reported that while Milwaukee breweries employed approximately 8,000 workers, only 25 of them were Black. While by 1964 those numbers had possibly improved, it cannot be overstated how momentous Title VII was.
Jim Windham, president of Pabst Brewing Company at that time, needed a visible, trusted voice in the Black community to lead Pabst’s effort of hiring Black production workers—so he called on Ted Mack.
“Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allowed minorities to file lawsuits against companies based on employment discrimination. This legislation ultimately integrated the brewing industry as well, which was previously overwhelmingly white.”
Mack’s job title at Pabst was the head of production and industrial relations. In this role, he helped hire over 100 Black production workers. Windham took notice of Mack’s drive and encouraged him to learn as much as he could about the different departments at the brewery. Mack took the opportunity to soak it all in.
In 1969, after more than 10 years of court battles, Pabst was ordered to divest itself of Blatz, another iconic Milwaukee beer brand, after the acquisition was ruled a violation of antitrust laws. The legal argument was that Pabst had violated Section 7 of the Clayton Act, which prohibits certain acquisitions “which the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.”
Sensing an opportunity, Mack formed a business group, United Black Enterprises (UBE), in an attempt to purchase Blatz.
United Black Enterprises was born out of a Black community development organization, the Afro Urban Institute (AUI). AUI’s goal, as spelled out in its founding agenda, was “community stability through economic viability.” Due to discriminatory housing laws, Milwaukee’s Northwest Side, or what is referred to as “Inner City North” in AUI’s agenda, contained over 95% of Milwaukee’s Black population, and 90% of the city’s Black poor. AUI sought to bring about economic change through investment and entrepreneurship at the same time that white flight to the suburbs was in full swing.
The fact that a Black business group was trying to buy something as large at Blatz in such a white industry as brewing made headlines. It also attracted unwanted attention from the government. Jan Crosby recalls her husband Henry—a member of UBE—telling her, “You’re going to hear clicking on the phone […] Our phones are being tapped [by the FBI], don’t let it bother you.”
In the end, federal Judge Robert Tehan put an end to UBE’s quest to buy Blatz. When UBE’s $9 million offer was outbid by G. Heileman Brewing Company from La Crosse, Wisconsin by almost $2 million, UBE requested an extension from Tehan to attempt to raise the additional funds. Tehan denied the extension on the basis that UBE was the last group to indicate interest in Blatz, and that its business plan was “embryonic.”
Mack was not ready to fold, declaring: “We did it your way […] I don’t know what method we’ll use next time, but we’ll be back.” The next time came less than a year later with the much smaller Peoples Brewing Company in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Peoples Brewing was in the same dire straits as many other regional breweries in 1970. Unable to keep up with the price war being waged by the large breweries, and aware that the business was facing extinction, Peoples’ 135 shareholders met in April 1970. 80% of them agreed to sell to UBE.
“There are no Black breweries anywhere in the U.S. and hardly any Black businesses of this size,” declared Henry Crosby, who had taken up a new role on Peoples’ board of directors. Unbeknownst to Crosby, Mack, and even the local newspapers, Peoples was not the first Black-owned brewery in the U.S., nor the only one in existence during this time.
In 1955, Colony House Brewing Company in Trenton, New Jersey was under Black ownership, and from October 1969—six months before the purchase of Peoples—Sunshine Brewing Company in Reading, Pennsylvania was purchased by Black businessmen from Philadelphia. Regardless, the purchase of Peoples was momentous in a state where beer was, and is, so closely tied to whiteness.
The purchase of Peoples was a much smoother transaction than the failed Blatz deal for a couple of reasons. First, Peoples was not worth anywhere near as much as Blatz, and was acquired for only $600,000. Second, two-thirds of the capital supplied for the deal came from the U.S. government’s Small Business Administration as part of President Richard Nixon’s “Black Capitalism” minority business plan. The remaining capital came from stock sales, with Ted Mack providing a large amount from his personal savings.
Oshkosh, Wisconsin was—and still is—a world apart from urban Milwaukee, even though the city is only an hour south. In 1970, the population of Oshkosh was around 53,000 people. Of that number, only 103 people are listed as African American in that year’s census. When Ted Mack and company bought Peoples, Mack stated that he was unaware of any Black residents in Oshkosh that weren’t associated with the local university. Pearl Mack, Ted’s widow, recalled that, because the Macks’ arrival to Oshkosh was so publicized, locals would often mistake one of the Black female professors for Mrs. Mack on the basis that Black women in Oshkosh were such a rare sight.
This was the atmosphere when Peoples reopened on October 11, 1970. There was a lot of curiosity from Oshkosh locals who showed up to take in the fanfare of the ribbon-cutting event. The Oshkosh Northwestern reported, “Hundreds of persons, blacks and whites, were on hand.” Ted Mack took the podium at noon and declared, “With this symbolic ceremony, we open the door to an unlimited future of expansion and growth for the Oshkosh-made product.” Jan Crosby recalls, “It was exciting, you know? It actually looked like we were going to do something.”
“The culture [in the late 1960s] was that the Caucasian race could do better for you than you could do for yourself […] A lot of times we didn’t support each other, we still don’t support each other the way we should.”
While there were some Oshkosh locals who purchased stock to support Peoples, there was also a significant amount of racist backlash. Unfounded rumors swirled that Mack was going to fire all of the white employees and replace them with Black workers. There were also rumors that the beer would be of lesser quality under Black ownership, even though the previous brewmaster had been retained. These rumors became so persistent that Peoples actually sent a sample of the beer to the respected Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago to be analyzed. Siebel declared the beer to be a quality product.
Peoples took a large financial hit when all Oshkosh-area taverns pulled Peoples from their taps at the outset of the transition to Black ownership. While Mack’s charisma and sincerity persuaded all but two establishments to carry Peoples again, the brewery still lost around $100,000 in the first year of Mack’s leadership. Adding to this deficit was the fact that Peoples began distributing outside of its local area for the first time, but largely failed to attract new customers. Apart from a few college campuses, where students perhaps connected with the anti-establishment vibe of the name “Peoples,” sales were falling elsewhere.
Mack had made large investments trying to get the beer into the urban areas that he hoped would respond to the Peoples’ cause. He really wanted Peoples to be the beer of Black culture in America. Unfortunately, Black people weren’t buying the beer. Mack lamented to the Black Milwaukee newspaper the Milwaukee Star, “Whites are saying they don’t want no N----r beer, and I don’t know what the Blacks are doing.” Mack’s widow Pearl recalls, “The culture [in the late 1960s] was that the Caucasian race could do better for you than you could do for yourself […] A lot of times we didn’t support each other, we still don’t support each other the way we should.”
In the end, the challenges were too great to surmount. Lack of an advertising budget prevented Peoples from reaching a wider customer base. Sales were failing to keep up with expansion even into Milwaukee, let alone the ambitious national distribution plan Mack was working toward. All the while, the SBA loans that started the venture were coming due. Mack authorized another stock sale in early 1972 to try and kickstart the brewery’s business, but it was too late. By November 1972, Mack laid off all staff and Peoples was effectively out of business.
Ted Mack and his associates did take the federal government to court after Peoples closed. Their claim was that, as a minority business with a loan from the SBA, Peoples was entitled to a certain portion of the military’s contract for beer orders. Mack and Peoples sued the SBA for $1 million, their determination of the proportionate amount due to one of the only Black-owned breweries in the nation. Mack stated that elected officials and the SBA told him that they would help him set these deals up, but almost no government business came to fruition. “They got 130-some odd dollars. That was sinful, absolutely sinful,” says Jan Crosby. Peoples lost the suit for not demonstrating the probability of their “ultimate success.”
In 1976, a significant payoff scheme came to light when a Securities and Exchange Commission employee became a whistleblower on the large brewery conglomerates. For example, Schlitz had a payoff fund to induce distributors and retailers to sell its products exclusively, or risk Schlitz taking its business elsewhere. The large breweries indicated in the testimony were hit with a fine, but for them it was all just another cost of doing business. For small breweries like Peoples, it was another factor that put them out of business.
It was hard enough to be a small brewery in the early 1970s, let alone a brewery that had to deal with systemic racism. It would not be until the modern craft era of the beer industry that Black Americans would again own breweries. Judging by recent surveys by the Brewers Association that indicate a 1% Black ownership rate, however, the U.S. still has a long way to go in making the brewing industry equitable.
Words, John HarryIllustrations, Araña Schulke
