At the height of the Black power movement, anything seemed possible, even the transformation of a national corporation like Avon, the cosmetics company that had staked its door-to-door marketing campaign on exclusive notions of white, middle-class respectability. The Black activists and corporate leaders who changed the company’s hiring policies, investment practices, and product lines in the late 1960s and 1970s applied strategies similar to those used by Black activists in Rochester, New York, and Cleveland, Ohio, to compel Fortune 500 Companies such as Xerox, Eastman Kodak, and McDonald’s to revise their definitions of corporate responsibility. These activists had put Black-led economic development and Black business on the nation’s radar as an urgent matter. In turn, many corporations, such as Avon, revisited existing policies and practices, hoping to avert the sort of public relations nightmare Kodak and McDonald’s had experienced. Avon redressed its near-exclusive focus on white customers and salespeople by recruiting Black workers, managers, and saleswomen, investing in Black-owned banks, and contracting with Black-owned companies. The company would also come to alter its product line to reflect the needs of its Black customers.

In so doing, Avon crafted a strategy to respond to the changes Black power had wrought while capitalizing on its most commodifiable elements. Avon’s new philosophy of corporate responsibility became a case study in so-called progressive capitalism for businesses around the globe. Meanwhile, some Black companies and leaders chose to work with Avon because they believed the beauty market could generate significant opportunities for Black workers and businesses. But their successes with Avon were double-edged. As Avon attracted Black customers, hired Black workers, and embraced a new multicultural aesthetic defined by the Black power movement, it also contributed to the decline of Black-owned beauty companies. Avon’s involvement with the business of Black power thus reveals both the possibilities of this moment and its ambiguous results.

In 1968, four years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed employment discrimination, Avon issued a confidential memorandum to high-level management outlining the company’s new corporate philosophy and approach to “minority group problems.” Avon, the memo established, would willingly comply with equal opportunity guidelines prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex, or national origin.