1990’s Advocacy Campaign Protects Residents from Tobacco Advertising Today
August 20, 2026
When you are trying to help protect your community, “you need an army,” says Janet Williams. For over thirty years, she has advocated for clean air and tobacco legislation first as staff with Respiratory Health Association (RHA) and currently as an RHA Board position. “The people who came before me and the people who will come after me, we have an army of smart people.”
Reflecting on RHA’s 120th anniversary, Janet shared that in 1991, RHA led a Chicago study of outdoor billboard advertising containing tobacco and alcohol products.
“We did a 50-ward analysis of alcohol and tobacco billboards across Chicago,” she shares. The team literally counted every billboard, noting the advertising theme. The data was then matched with the 1990 US Census demographic and race information on population by neighborhood, in order to document which geographic areas of the city had excess tobacco or alcohol billboards.
According to a 1995 study by Daryl Hackbarth, Barbara Silvestri and Wendy Cosper, published in the Journal of Public Health Policy, the data revealed that majority Black and Latino wards were burdened with three times as many tobacco billboards and five times as many alcohol billboards compared with majority white wards. The findings are congruent with studies conducted in other urban areas, which prove a consistent pattern of tobacco and alcohol advertisers targeting poor and minority neighborhoods for outdoor advertising of their products.
Janet describes tobacco companies as a “multi-billion dollar industry who have people who can sit and think about how they can subvert social norms; how they can subvert the laws; how they can subvert system level policies, what they can do to keep people smoking as long as they want them to, and to keep them ingesting chemicals. It is frustrating.”
The National Library of Medicine describes the process as mapping all 4,247 licensed billboards in Chicago that were within 500- and 1,000-foot radiuses of schools, parks, and playlots. The percentage of alcohol and tobacco billboards within the 500- and 1,000-foot zones ranged from 0% to 54%. African American and Hispanic neighborhoods were disproportionately targeted for outdoor advertising of alcohol and tobacco.
Father Michael Pleger, a Chicago pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church in a mostly Black neighborhood, began to take matters into his own hands. Father Pfleger said, as quoted in the Seattle Times in 1998, he defaced three billboards near his church in the summer of 1991 only after several companies ignored requests to remove the splashy ads he called “24-hour pushers.”
“This is about children’s life and death and the future of the community,” he said. Billboard operators “have got to develop some moral responsibility.”
When billboard owners refused to listen, he and others climbed ladders.
“Father Pfleger was whitewashing billboards, tobacco billboards,” she remembers. “He was arrested and was before a judge.” He was charged with destruction of private property, but was acquitted by a jury in 1991, as covered by National Catholic Report.
In 1997, the Chicago Sun-Times reported the Chicago City Council voted 44–1 to eliminate tobacco and alcohol billboards from selected areas in Chicago. Pfleger described the decision as “a tremendous victory for the children of Chicago, for our neighborhoods, especially black and Hispanic neighborhoods.”
Given all the mountains that were moved, for decades, to ensure laws were passed to protect people from tobacco advertising, Janet agrees it is frustrating to see vaping, smoking and the use of nicotine products on the rise again.
“What is it, everything old is new again? I think we knew, even when we got a win, that unfortunately it’s like a game of whack-a-mole. It is disappointing, but we certainly have the heart. We have smart people who have a passion and commitment to continue protecting the people who are still being impacted by this industry that has no moral backbone.”
