Lowell D. Thompson is a Chicago-born, bred and based artist/writer/creative catalyst. He calls himself a "recovering adman" because he spent the first 35 years of his adulthood creating ads and commercials for many of the nation's biggest advertising agencies.

In fact, he was one of the first African Americans hired in advertising when American companies finally opened themselves to "unwhites" following the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the urban riots that followed.

But after beginning his stunning tranformation from adman to "RaceMan" in the early 90s, he has spent most of his ad design and writing savvy on his attempts to save the world, starting right here in America.

Recently Thompson has helped write a book that has already been Amazon's #1 non-fiction African-American book, "Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority". Although another AfrAmerican adman's name, Tom Burrell, is on the cover, Thompson had a major hand in both writing the book and designing and writing the full-color Branding and Brainwashing Timeline that is the centerpiece of the book.

Thompson is also the creator of "Buy The Cover", which he says is the "first and only blog on the internet that rates only covers for both title and design". You can reach Thompson at lowellt@hotmail.com or http://buythecover.com

Thompson is a contributor to AALBC.com check out his articles.

 

African Americans in Chicago (Images of America)
Click to order via Amazon

Paperback: 128 pages
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing (February 6, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0738588539
ISBN-13: 978-0738588537
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 0.3 inches

The story of black Chicago is so rich that few know it all. It began long before the city itself. "The first white man here was a black man," Potowatami natives reportedly said about Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the brown-skinned man recognized as Chicago's first non-Indian settler. It's all here: from the site of DuSable's cabin--now smack-dab in the middle of Chicago's Magnificent Mile--to images of famous and infamous residents like boxers Jack Johnson, Muhammed Ali, and Joe Louis. Here are leaders and cultural touchstones like Jesse Binga's bank, Robert S. Abbott's Chicago Defender, legendary filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, Ida B. Wells, the Eighth Regiment, Jesse Jackson, Oprah, and much more . . . including a guy named Obama. Here is the black Chicago family album, of folks who made and never made the headlines, and pictures and stories of kinship and fellowship of African Americans leaving the violent, racist South and "goin' to Chicago" to find their piece of the American Dream. Chicago has been called the "Second City," but black Chicago is second to none.  

 

"WHITE FOLKS": Seeing America Through Black Eyes
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Paperback: 200 pages
Publisher: Lowell Thompson Creates; 1 edition (August 10, 1996)
ISBN-10: 0964761610
ISBN-13: 978-0964761612

"WHITEFOLKS: Seeing America Through Black Eyes" is Thompson  first book. Thompson designed the cover painting, wrote and set the type, and self-published it in 1995. It has become a classic in the arcane field of "Whiteness Studies", being one of the first books ever written on the subject (before it was a subject to most of "white" academia).

 

 

Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority
Click to order via Amazon

by Tom Burrell

Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Smiley Books; 1 edition (February 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1401925928
ISBN-13: 978-1401925925
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches

Read an AALBC.com Book Review

"Black people are not dark-skinned white people," says advertising visionary Tom Burrell. In fact, they are much more. They are survivors of the Middle Passage and centuries of humiliation and deprivation, who have excelled against the odds, constantly making a way out of "No way!" At this pivotal point in history, the idea of black inferiority should have had a "Going-Out-of-Business Sale." After all, Barack Obama has reached America’s Promised Land.

Yet, as Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority testifies, too many in black America are still wandering in the wilderness. In this powerful examination of “the greatest propaganda campaign of all time”—the masterful marketing of black inferiority, aka the BI Complex—Burrell poses ten disturbing questions that will make black people look in the mirror and ask why, nearly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, so many blacks still think and act like slaves. Burrell’s acute awareness of the power of words and images to shift, shape, and change the collective consciousness has led him to connect the contemporary and historical dots that have brought us to this crossroads.

Brainwashed is not a reprimand—it is a call to action. It demands that we question our self-defeating attitudes and behaviors. Racism is not the issue; how we respond to media distortions and programmed self-hatred is the issue. It’s time to reverse the BI campaign with a globally based initiative that harnesses the power of new media and the wisdom of intergenerational coalitions. Provocative and powerful, Brainwashed dares to expose the wounds so that we, at last, can heal.

 

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