People's Beer

There is a great article in the Scene about People's Brewery in Oshkosh, which in 1970 became the Nation's first black owned brewery. Lasting only until 1972, the story of People's is a fascinating piece of Oshkosh history. Some excerpts:

“We, like most of northern Wisconsin at the time, had very little exposure to blacks,” Gruberg said. “Appleton and Sheboygan at that time had ordinances that blacks couldn’t reside in those communities.”

It was in this climate that 41-year-old Theodore Mack Sr. not only became president of Peoples Brewery in blue-collared, steel-toed Oshkosh in April 1970, but also announced that at the end of the 1970 school year he would move his wife and four children from Milwaukee to Oshkosh.

“I grew up in Alabama where they threw rocks at me and called me nigger,” Mack said at an introductory press conference in April 1970. “I don’t scare easily. I will not run, no sir.”

How did People's do in Oshkosh

Trouble started almost immediately, mostly in the form of rumors, the first one being that Mack was going to fire the 21 white employees and replace them with blacks. That rumor may have been started by a short, anonymous newspaper account from early April 1970 about the group’s offer to buy the brewery, which ends by saying that the UBE’s attorney and spokesman, Harold B. Jackson, “has said that if a brewery is acquired, all top and middle management jobs would be filled by blacks and the policy would be to hire blacks.”

That, however, is the only reference to a black hiring policy in the many documents and newspaper reports and interviews with Ted Mack from that time.

“I want to get away from the blackness and the whiteness,” Mack said at an April 1970 press conference. “I don’t believe in black power, and I don’t believe in white power. There is only one power in this country. That’s green power – money.”

“I want to be happy here making beer,” he said.

...

Several tavern owners said they had stopped serving Peoples because their customers wouldn’t drink it. At one of the taverns, the reporter observed a worker just “off the 7-3 shift” amble in and say, “Gimme some of that smoky stuff,” and was promptly served a glass of Peoples beer. Since Peoples was a golden American lager, the patron was not referring to “smoky” beer.

“People wouldn’t drink it. I had to take it off,” recalls Alan Repp, the 69-year-old owner of Repp’s Bar, a proudly blue collar establishment on the south side of the Fox River, just across the bridge from the sprawling lumber baron mansions on Algoma Boulevard.
With 65 years in business, Repp’s is considered to be the oldest family owned bar in Oshkosh. Alan took the business over from his father, Al, in the 1960s.

“We were the third largest distributor of Peoples at the time,” Repp said.

So why take the beer off if it was that popular with the mill workers who once filled the place?

“An ultra-conservative town like this and a black person owns the brewery?” Repp said. “Just like anything else, if it doesn’t sell, you take it off.”

A great article, I encourage you to read it!