Trailblazing ad exec

In 1969, a Chicago advertising agency was working on an ad concept that would parody the social justice marches of the day to sell hair care products. One of the staff members assigned to execute it, a black woman named Barbara Gardner Proctor, wasn’t amused.

“It was during the days of the black revolution,” Ms. Proctor recalled 20 years later in an interview with CSPAN, “and they wanted me to do a ‘foam-in’ demonstration in the streets, with women running down the streets waving hair spray cans. I said I would never do that.”

She was fired, which set the stage for a bit of history.

“It became quite apparent to me,” she said, “that if I did not begin to control my own destiny, I was going to have it changed about every five years.”

And so the next year she became, by all accounts, the first black woman in the United States to found her own ad agency when she established Proctor & Gardner. There was no partner; she simply used her married name and her maiden name to create the impression that there might be a male associate, in case any potential clients had chauvinistic leanings. Eventually she built Proctor & Gardner into a multimillion-dollar company.

Ms. Proctor, whose career also included a small role in bringing the music of the Beatles to the United States and a shout-out from President Ronald Reagan during a State of the Union address, died Dec. 19 in Chicago. She was 86.

Regina Young, a former employee and family friend, said she had recently fractured a hip in a fall and also had dementia. Her death came to light only last week.

“Barbara Gardner Proctor was a legendary pioneer in advertising, entering the business during the 1960s ‘Mad Men’ era when black people generally could not get hired in advertising firms,” Judy Foster Davis, a professor at Eastern Michigan University and the author of “Pioneering AfricanAmerican Women in the Advertising Business: Biographies of Mad Black Women” (2017), said by email. “As the first African-American woman to establish an advertising agency, she succeeded in a field which was — and continues to be — quite exclusionary with respect to women of color in high positions.”

Ms. Proctor, who started her company with no capital or experience as a chief executive, was matter-of-fact about her leap of faith. “You can only do it when you don’t know you can’t do it,” she said.

Barbara Juanita Gardner was born on Nov. 30, 1932, in Black Mountain, N.C. Her mother, Bernice, who later worked at the Pentagon, was an unmarried teenager, and when she moved to Washington to attend secretarial school, Barbara was sent to live with a family in Asheville, N.C. When Barbara was about 4, her grandmother brought her back to Black Mountain to live with her. She grew up there in a house without electricity or running water, in an area where everyone, white or black, was poor. When the CSPAN interviewer asked her about overcoming steep odds, she said, “I didn’t know they were odds; that was life.” Only when she went back to Asheville for high school, she said, did she realize how sparse the circumstances of her childhood had been.

After graduating in 1950 she attended historically black Talladega College in Alabama.