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The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business. By Stephanie Capparell. New York: Free Press, 2007. xvii + 349 pp. Photographs, bibliography, index. Cloth, $25.00. ISBN: 0-743-26571-8.
Reviewed by Robert E. Weems Jr.
Stephanie Capparell, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has written an engaging, well-researched account of Pepsi-Cola's pioneering efforts both to diversify its corporate sales force and to increase its market share among African American consumers during the mid-twentieth century. To tell this story, Capparrell utilized a variety of sources, including accounts by "six surviving members of the original Pepsi special-markets teams . . . [who] made possible the retelling of this important episode of business history" (p. 285).
Besides utilizing oral histories in telling the story of "the real Pepsi challenge," Capparell consulted a large number of contemporary African American newspapers. Because of Pepsi's unprecedented reliance on African American salesmen to market the beverage across the country, the exploits of the "Brown Hucksters" received widespread, favorable coverage in black periodicals.
Although the African American pioneers at Pepsi-Cola were lionized in the black press, as traveling sales representatives they faced special challenges in "Jim Crow" America. First and foremost, unlike their white counterparts, black salespersons could never be certain that they...