For New Mexico State University professor Clint Lanier, his book about the nation's first Black-owned brewery isn't just about the business' rise and fall.
""Ted Mack and America's First Black-Owned Brewery" is about something more profound, Lanier said in a New Mexico State University news release issued Monday.
"The story of Ted Mack and 'Peoples Beer' is really a story about civil rights," Lanier, an assistant professor of English at NMSU, said in the news release.
"Ted Mack and America’s First Black Owned Brewery: The Rise and Fall of Peoples Beer," published by McFarland & Company, tells Mack's story as an inspiration to other Black-owned breweries across the nation.
Lanier said he was inspired to tell Mack's story after he learned about Mack several years ago and recognized the lack of representation of the Black community's contributions to the history of beer in America. Lanier said he sees his book as an attempt to reclaim and preserve a significant part of this history.
"Mack once famously said that white people will give welfare to Black people, but they wouldn’t give them industry," Lanier said. "So, he decided to get the industry started for himself, and in the process show the Black community how to lift themselves up."
About 12,000 breweries operated in the United States in Mack's day, of which only approximately 90 owned by individuals of color.
Mack, a civil rights leader from Milwaukee, assembled a coalition of Black business owners and acquired the Peoples Brewing Company in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
"When I started researching, the more I learned about him, the more amazed I was," Lanier said. "He started life as a sharecropper, he was a scholarship football player at Ohio State, he was a Korean War veteran and a civil rights activist. He organized buses to Washington, D.C. and school boycotts. The list goes on. Everyone needs to know his story."
Lanier's research included reaching out to Mack's family and former business associates in Wisconsin, in addition to interviews and studing public. Lanier gradually produced his narrative about the rise and fall of the Peoples Brewing Company.
"Ted Mack would say, 'if the Black man wants to raise himself up, he has to get into the corporate structure of America'," Lanier said. "So those two thoughts led him to taking the steps he did. He wanted to demonstrate that Black men could enter the corporate structure and participate in industry at that level. People like Ted Mack lit a torch and led the way. Whether or not he was successful, he was able to demonstrate what could be done."