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From: angusj@mindspring.com (Angus Johnston)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: FAQ/archive question for old AFU fogeys
Date: 11 Nov 1996 21:07:53 GMT

mtepper@panix.com (Michele Tepper) writes:

> It's in Patricia Turner's _Heard
> It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture_. There's
> some evidence that the rumor was, if not necessarily invented, then at
> least helped along by employees of the larger beverage companies, which
> resented having to share the shelf space with a regional upstart.

Misha's pretty much pegged it. Tropical Fantasy is a fruit flavored drink produced by a small New York family business---when it was introduced in 1990, flyers started circulating around NY saying that TF and another drink were owned by the KKK, that they made Black men sterile, and noting (correctly) that the drinks were being sold primarily in the inner city. The flier claimed that a story on the topic had been run by 20/20 (is this beginning to sound familiar?).

Sales of TF plummeted. Anti-TF graffiti was reported, and _Newsweek_ claimed that distributors and deliverers had been threatened with physical violence. Some stores apparently stopped carrying the drink. In response, the company that made TF got the stuff tested by the FDA, hired a Black PR team and a billboard truck, and got then-Mayor David Dinkins (an African American) to drink a bottle on TV. Eventually, sales began to pick up, and the story began to latch on to other local soft drinks.

As Michele suggests, the makers of TF have collected a fair amount of evidence implicating their competitors in spreading the rumors---apparently the source of one of the flyers claimed to have got it from a Pepsi employee, for instance. Turner, though, thinks the culprits were less likely the drink companies themselves than union truck drivers concerned about protecting their turf.

All this is from Patricia A. Turner's excellent _I heard It Through the Grapevine_.