Ted Mack and America's First Black-Owned Brewery: The Rise and Fall of Peoples Beer

Born a sharecropper in rural Alabama in 1930, Theodore A. (Ted) Mack, Sr., fought in the Korean War and then played football at Ohio State while earning a college degree. Brewing and selling beer, he believed, would be just another peak to attain. After all, it couldn't be more challenging than his experience in organizing buses to the March on Washington or picketing segregated schools in Milwaukee.

This is the story of Mack's purchase of Peoples Brewing Company in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Tho...