ger. Unlike Robeson's assessment of the network, Cole praised NBC for maintaining "democratic and wise public relations" in backing his efforts. According to Cole, his cancellation by NBC was a function of TV reality: "They wanted me on the network; they wanted to keep me. But they had to shift me around because I didn't have a network sponsor and shows with single, network sponsors get preferential treatment."
Cole, however, did name a culprit in his television demise. The focus of his animosity was the advertising industry which, he claimed, never really tried to sell his program to a national account. For a man with a reputation for reserve and gentility, he was vitriolic when he wrote in Ebony that "Madison Avenue, the center of the advertising industry, and their big clients didn't want their products associated with Negroes." Cole asserted that he never found a sponsor because "Madison Avenue said I couldn't be sold, that no national advertiser would take a chance on offending Southerners."
Ironically, experience with television led him to a position remarkably similar to that of Robeson, the leftist activist who approved of the classless Soviet Union and its Marxian social and economic arrangement. "It's not the people in the South who create racial problems," Cole argued, "it's the people who govern the South." According to him, most Southerners "are fine people. But those who govern isolate the people by advocating a rigid policy of discrimination; whether the people want it or not, they are not allowed to participate in mixed audiences because of their laws."
As Cole saw it, bigotry was purposely nurtured by an influential minority, "those who govern and those who incite others through organizations such as the White Citizens Council. Significantly, he dismissed most white Southern bigots as small-minded people who worried about lesser matters such as "the mixing of the races." But he attacked "the big men" who exploited the situation.
In Cole's quasi-Marxian analysis, "the big men" were those "who control Wall Street, the men who run Madison Avenue." And they, in his view, "are worried about economics." In a statement worthy of Robeson, he wrote that "racial prejudice is more finance than romance."
Bitter, disappointed, and frustrated by his experience, Nat King Cole refused to blame his cancellation on Southern prejudice, for as he noted, "After all, Madison Avenue is in the North." In absolving the South, he alleged that "I think sometimes the South is used as a football to take some of the stain off us in the North." In a conclusion with which Robeson would have concurred, he called upon all African Americans to organize and assert their financial strength to offset "the big men." According to him, "We need to show the strength of the Negro market." He continued:
Negroes above all, must become financially independent. All things, as intelligent Negroes know, boil down to money. We must, before it is too late, solidify our positions. We must sup¬port organizations like the Urban League and the NAACP.... They are all working for racial betterment. Negroes, too, must invest more, not only in entertainment enterprises, but in all businesses. We should put our money to work because money is what the people working against us respect.
Emerging through the frustration in Cole's argument was an insightful description of the reluctance of the advertising industry to sell his series. Madison Avenue did not think the show would survive. Even with a new format and improved summer ratings, agency interest in selling the program to an advertiser was not kindled. At the base of this lack of enthusiasm was the sensitivity of Madison Avenue to the so-called Southern Market.
Ironically, five months before the Nat King Cole Show premiered, Variety reported that pressure from advertisers with southern markets was "setting back by many years the advancement made in television toward providing equal job opportunities regardless of race, creed, or color." With the civil rights movement swelling in the South, national advertisers 