“No music please" [A&SC 27].

In November of 1969, nine months following NML's city-wide dinner fundraising event, a Tacoma Ad Club bigwig named Dave Steel curated an 8-minute TV spot that proclaimed the monumental success of the NML campaign. This video paired slides of the African American community in Tacoma with solemn, congratulatory commentary of the efficacy of the fundraiser.

While Mr. Steel organized the video to celebrate the success of NML, his script aggressively catered to a white, middle-class audience. Although this retrospective-looking advertisement was ostensibly created to celebrate the success of the NML campaign, it repeatedly seeks to eulogize the gut-wrenching poverty of Tacoma's black community rather than exalt the black business owners who used the NML funds to rise to success despite the hardships.

The text of this script (which numbers at eight pages) generalizes the “public” of the Tacoma community into a homogeneously white group, which conversely others the African American presence in Tacoma and reinforces the divide between white affluence/education and black poverty [A&SC 27].

This ad goes on to detail and praise the active response of banks, schools, advertising organizations, and wealthy white families to the NML campaign, while neglecting to include any concrete details about the entrepreneurial endeavors of the black business-owners who received funding from the initiative [A&SC 27].

Setting aside the fact that the phrase “ghetto problem” generalizes the African American community in Tacoma to a single, problematic entity (i.e. “ghetto”), the wording of this first sentence also reduces the socio-economic gulf between the African American community and the white community to a single, solvable “problem.” By rhetorically simplifying the Byzantine issue of race relations to a site-specific “problem,” the script more or less characterizes the impoverished African American community as a zit on the face of the “city” of Tacoma; a zit for the wealthy, progressive white man to pop.

Similarly, the rhetoric of this stats-filled passage operates under the assumption of a stark dichotomy between Tacoma’s white and black communities. Just as the narrator refrains from citing the medical source for these mortality statistics, he also refrains from specifically defining the rather demeaning blanket term, “ghetto homes.” He juxtaposes these “substandard...ghetto homes” with those in “Greater Tacoma” [A&SC 27]. It’s notable that the narrator doesn’t even need to specify that the area he deems “Greater Tacoma” is predominantly white...and there’s something distinctly unsettling about the use of the pejorative, inherently supremacist word “Greater” to describe the white community.

As the 60s died, Steel's video revealed that the ingrained socio-cultural schism between the white and black communities of Tacoma persisted...at least in the world of advertising.