Thread by @michaelharriot

Someone tagged me on this because I've told it before.

Basically, it WAS Canada Dry, until...

A thread

In the days before WebMD, an enterprising scammer could make a fortune promoting ANYTHING as a health product. If you wanted to stay healthy, you needed to include gin, a few cigarettes and some tonic to your health routine

But if a scammer REALLY wanted people to trust a product, they would sell it straight to a pharmacy. Like the dude who couldn't sell his tonic named after Dr. Joseph Lister (who had nothing to do with it). He made a deal pharmacist, & the pharmacist sold it as a health drink

a wound cleaner and even a hair product!

And that's how we got Listerine

But a lot of shit started like that. Pharmacists promoted Lysol as a feminine hygiene product. And if you had a toothache or dandruff, you went to the drugstore and asked for a little nose candy.

And while you were waiting, you could drink a health tonic.

People always thought carbonated mineral water had health benefits. But you had to go to a "soda fountain" to get it. So pharmacists started developing recipes for carbonated "tonics" that could work wonders.

In 1885, Waco pharmacist Charles Alderton created a shit-inducing tonic called Dr. Pepper (No, seriously. Ppl thought prune juice was the secret ingredient). Coca-Cola's cocaine & nuts made you smarter

AGAIN, people would buy the SYRUP & the drugstore would add it to the soda. If you could develop your own health tonic syrup, you could make $$$

In 1885, John J McLaughlin finished pharmacy undergrad, moved from Canada to NYC & got a job at in an NYC suburb called Weeksville

In 1838, 11 years after NY abolished slavery, James Weeks bought some land & established a community outside of NY. By the Civil War, it was the 2nd-largest free Black community in America. After the Civil War, Caribbean immigrants & freedmen migrated to Weeksville.

In 1883, NYC finished a construction project that began the gentrification of Weeksville. John wasn't TECHNICALLY a pharmacist, but in Weeksville, he could work his way through grad school as a "dispenser," which meant he was also in charge of making the tonics.

Now, Weeksville was small, but "Colored School No. 2" was right across the street from the pharmacy. Every day, after school, the soda fountain would be packed. In 5 years, John was the store manager of the largest pharmacy in the city

Not in Weeksville, it didn't exist anymore

Because of that construction project – the Brooklyn Bridge – Weeksville had been absorbed by Brooklyn. Then, Brooklyn was absorbed by NYC. By then, John had moved back to Canada with a tonic that contained an ingredient he got from those Caribbean immigrants:

Jamaican Ginger

But unlike his competitors, John didn't sell the syrup to drugstores. He had a better idea: He opened a carbonated WATER bottling plant.

Now, a candy store owner in Mississippi was bottling Cokes to sell, but Coca-Cola bottling was formed in 1899 & it wasn't widely available in bottles until the early 1900s

In 1894, John took this ad out:

What does this have to do with Black folk?

I don't know if you heard about this guy called Jim Crow, but bc of segregation, SOME PEOPLE couldn't walk in a drugstore sit down at the counter & order a soda

For a few years, Canada Dry was the ONLY soda Black Southerners had

But that's still not the final answer.

See after WW2, "luxury" brands didn't want Black ppl buying their products. For instance, a Black person couldn't go to a dealership & buy a brand new Cadillac without a white straw purchaser

washingtonpost.com/archive/busine…

So US distributors restricted Black liquor salesmen to ONLY selling low-end liquor. And they could only sell to Black bars. Black bar owners in the South couldn't get liquor licenses, so they sold bootleg liquor from Canada. Everyone knows Black men love their brown liquor.

No seriously, everyone knows it. In fact, when Black men enlisted in the Army to fight in WW2, the US ARMY created a handbook warning Black soldiers that the combination of drinking cognac and listening to jazz would make them rape white women

So in 1959, when Black liquor salesmen in NY went on strike, something weird happened...

When Congressman Adam Clayton Powell got involved, somehow people said the BLACK PEOPLE were racist. So Black people around the country began participating in the "whiskey rebellion"

Not only were people buying bootleg liquor. Morman McGhee, a newspaper owner who had the first Black-owned brokerage firm in the US, came up with a crazy idea:

What if Black people started buying Seagram's stock?

Canadian sales of bootleg liquor started booming. Seagram started hiring Black ppl and we actually bought the stock

US distributors and white liquor salesman were so mad that they began snitching that Black clubs were selling bootleg liquor.

Meanwhile, two companies saw an opening

Killian, the cousin of a French liquor company's CEO, came to the US to begin marketing SPECIFICALLY to Black customers. The family business started booming.

Killian HENNESSEY became CEO

The other company that swooped in had never sold its product to ANYONE in the US

But in the 1960s, it decided to target the ignored Black market too by pushing its most exclusive brand that had refused to sell outside of the country:

Seagram's Crown Royal

But Seagram's didn't just market Crown Royal to Black Americans.

It's why Black folks who drink "white" drink bumpy-face. And Seagram's Seven. Canadian CLAnd...

Of course, they sold the ginger ale.

Here's the crazy part.

John's Mclaughlin's brothers said he was stupid for selling sodas instead of going into their daddy's wagon-building business.

They were right. The dad's company became General Motors of Canada.

And when the King & Queen of England visited Canada in 1939, Canada commissioned the Royal Family a purple and gold handmade McLoughlin-Buick

Now, ANYONE could get one of these Buicks if they had enough money. Canada got them a gift fit for a King & Queen...

And Black people.

So, to answer the question,

Canada Dry is the OG
But for a minute, a lot of Black folk drank Seagrams

Because they were supporting Black-owned business