There is something uncanny about this image—Toussaint Louverture, stripped of the very thing that made him. He’s there, immortalized in a 1940s beer ad for Pfeiffer’s, a proxy pitchman for a cold pint. Is it just me or was he deracinated there? His blackness—diluted. Toussaint, the general who outmaneuvered Napoleon, Toussaint, who spoke of liberty with the same breath that he held a sword, Toussaint, whose very name sent tremors through the slave-owning world—rendered here, curiously, as something else.
The ad celebrates him, sure. It even reaches for legitimacy, name-dropping the poets who sang his praises. But the history is mangled, the details askew. And then the question: Who was this for? Who, in 1940, was meant to look at this image of a smoothed-out Toussaint, the rough edges of revolution airbrushed away, and feel… what? Pride? Nostalgia? A knowing nod over a bottle of Pfeiffer’s?
I sat with that question longer than I expected. Then I went digging.
Pfeiffer Brewing Company, established in 1889 by German immigrant Conrad Pfeiffer in Detroit, Michigan, played a notable role in supporting the African American community during the early to mid-20th century. Following Prohibition, Pfeiffer made concerted efforts to hire Black employees. In 1935, the company promoted Henry Cummings to salesman, marking him as possibly the first Black salesman for a brewing company. The management expressed intentions to employ Black workers in various positions within the company.
in 1938, the company ran a campaign in the Detroit Tribune, a Black newspaper, to mark Negro History Week—the precursor to what we now call Black History Month. The campaign, titled Builders of History and Civilization, profiled figures like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Sojourner Truth, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. It wasn’t just lip service, either. The response was so strong that Pfeiffer kept it going in 1939. By May 1940, at the Negro World’s Fair in Detroit, they had an entire exhibit—booklets profiling 25 Black leaders, a public affirmation that Black history wasn’t some side note but something to be studied, acknowledged, honored.
And so that famous Faulkner line rings true again: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Because here we are, in an era where the Trump administration slashes and burns through DEI programs, as though this effort to recognize Black excellence is some new affront to American life. As if, 85 years ago, a beer company wasn’t already doing what so many corporations today claim is some radical imposition.
History loops. The same struggles, repackaged. The same fights, renamed. And somewhere in the archives, Toussaint Louverture, turned into a mèt blan, made soft, looks back at us from a beer ad and reminds us: They will always try to write you in ways that make them comfortable. The question is—who will hold the pen?
