N.Y. Residents Decry Alcohol, Cigarette Ads

Harlem residents fed up with billboards enticing them to buy alcohol and cigarettes splashed paint over more than a dozen of the signs Saturday.

Singing “Yield Not to Temptation,” about 50 members of the Abyssinian Baptist Church marched with buckets and paint rollers down a street in Harlem, a section of New York where a recent study found that black men have shorter life spans than men in Bangladesh.

“Alcohol kills more people than heroin, marijuana, crack and cocaine together,” said the Rev. Calvin O. Butts, the protest organizer and church pastor. It was the group’s second swing through Harlem in two weeks.

Butts said billboards advertising such products as whiskey and cigarettes “proliferate in the African-American community more than any other community,” often degrade women and are designed to entice youths.

John Brown, vice president of Metropolitan Outdoor Advertising, announced Saturday that his company, one of the biggest distributors of small billboards in the United States, would remove liquor and cigarette billboards within 5 blocks of places of worship, schools and play areas in New York.