IT IS no secret that tobacco firms have long funded African American civil rights organisations. Now internal documents have revealed that the industry coordinated some of the campaigns that black leaders waged against tobacco taxation.
Valerie Yerger and Ruth Malone of the University of California, San Francisco, trawled 40 million documents released into the public domain as part of the $246 billion Master Settlement Agreement between US states and tobacco companies. They found that the industry had targeted black groups not just to get more African Americans smoking, but to exploit the civil rights movement and buy political influence. Their…
