SOUL REACH

Edward F. Boyd, one of the first African-American managers in corporate America, died on Monday, April 30, in Los Angeles. He was 92.

“Pepsi’s president, Walter S. Mack, who both favored progressive causes and saw the vast potential of the Black market, hired Mr. Boyd in 1947,” an obituary in the New York Times noted. “Mr. Mack had started a three-member Black sales force in 1940, but World War II ended it.
“Marketing specifically to African-Americans allowed Pepsi to expand at the expense of Coke Cola. It already had an advantage: its nickel bottle was 12 ounces, compared with Coke’s six. (“Twice as much,” ads boasted.) The upshot was that Pepsi under Mr. Boyd pioneered what Madison Avenue a generation later called ‘niche marketing.’”

“The thing in my life I’ve had most to fight is bitterness,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 1997.

“I always realized that once I became embittered, I’d lose my objectivity and become nonfunctional and ineffective.”

Boyd was 30 when he married Edith Jones, who survives him, as do his daughter, Rebecca, of Manhattan, his sons Brandon of Manhattan, Edward, Jr. of Boulder, Colo., and Timothy of Chicago, and a granddaughter.

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