Publisher Helped Chronicle Black Life With Ebony and Jet
John H. Johnson, 87, who used a $500 loan to found what became the world’s largest African American publishing company, changing the face of American media with Ebony and Jet magazines, died Monday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. He had congestive heart failure.
Since his start in 1942 with the Negro Digest, Johnson built $498.2 million in holdings that include the popular and profitable Ebony Fashion Fair and the country’s largest black-owned cosmetics company, Fashion Fair Cosmetics.
Ebony and Jet, with glossy pictures of entertainers and articles on current events, black history and culture, became coffee table fixtures in homes, offices and barbershops in the African American community. For six decades, the magazines chronicled black life in this country, from just after World War II through the civil rights movement and the growth of the black middle class. They provided for black Americans a more reflective view of themselves than any other media, and despite criticism over the years, the magazines continued to hold on to their niche.
Johnson, the first successful black publisher to emerge after World War II, capitalized on the scarcity of positive images of black Americans in the mainstream media when he started the Negro Digest. He used his mother’s new furniture as collateral on a loan to start the periodical, which resembled Reader’s Digest and reprinted stories from other publications.
While working for the Supreme Life Insurance Co. in Chicago, he sold charter subscriptions for $2 each and distributed 5,000 copies. The magazine’s popularity grew, making a leap in circulation from 50,000 to 100,000 in October 1943 when Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a guest column titled, “If I Were a Negro.”
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