Overview
Barbara Gardner Proctor was born in 1932 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and was raised mostly by her grandmother in a home with no electricity or running water. After college, she wrote for DownBeat magazine about jazz and worked for Vee-Jay Records, a Chicago record label, where she helped bring some of the Beatles’ first records to the United States. She moved into advertising in the mid-1960s, and in 1970 she started her own agency, Proctor & Gardner Advertising, in Chicago. She is widely recognized as the first African American woman to start an advertising agency. Her clients included Kraft Foods, Sears, Illinois Bell, and Jewel Food Stores, and Jewel credited her team with rescuing its low-selling line of generic foods.
Why She Matters
Proctor ran her own agency when very few women, and even fewer Black women, led advertising companies. She chose her clients carefully, and her agency never worked for cigarette or liquor companies. In 1984, she told the Chicago Tribune, “My position has always been that advertising does not reflect life; it reinforces and determines lifestyle.” Her company grew into the country's second-largest African American advertising agency, and that same year President Ronald Reagan praised her in his State of the Union address. Her agency ran for about 25 years before closing in the mid-1990s.
