During World War II, African Americans found themselves battling two very different wars as part of what was known as the “Double V” challenge: a war against fascist forces in Europe and a war on the home front against racism in the United States. Even as African Americans enlisted in the U.S. military to defeat the Nazi’s occupation in Europe, they knew that life under a set of regimented Jim Crow laws would prevent them from achieving recognition as full citizens in America. When they returned to America after fighting abroad, these heroic African American soldiers were prohibited from drinking from certain water fountains and eating at various restaurants.
The Black Press, which had had a long tradition of advocating for African Americans dating back to 1827 in New York with the publication of Freedom’s Journal, quickly emerged as an important resource in articulating the interests of African Americans in the early 1940s. In major cities like Chicago, where the Chicago Renaissance was well under way, Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender, which was founded in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott and later passed down to his nephew John H. Sengstacke, boasted an impressive circulation of 82,059. The newspaper challenged the discrimination that had become so pervasive throughout the country.
It was in this tradition that John Harold Johnson created what would later become a multimillion dollar enterprise: Johnson Publishing Company. It is no coincidence that Johnson would build his company in the same city where Sengstacke’s firm was headquartered, thus making Chicago a popular destination spot for African American writers looking to begin careers writing for Black-owned publications.
Born on January 19, 1918, in rural Arkansas City, Arkansas, to Leroy Johnson and Gertrude Jenkins Johnson, an impoverished Black family, John H. Johnson suffered a series of devastating setbacks as a child. His father was tragically killed in a sawmill accident when he was just eight years old, and Johnson was quickly forced to confront the harsh realities of segregation in the South. He attended the community’s overcrowded, racially segregated elementary school because Blacks were unable to enroll elsewhere. Following the path that took many African American southerners from the South to the North, young Johnson and his mother set out for Chicago in 1933 in a journey as part of the African American Great Migration. Johnson’s mother decided that the Jim Crow South was not a good place to raise a Black child from whom she expected greatness. There were no Black high schools in the town of Johnson’s birth. In fact, Johnson repeated the eighth grade just to keep learning. To give her only son an opportunity for a better life, Johnson’s mother worked as a camp cook on a levee for two years to save up enough money for the train trip to Chicago, where she and her young son lived with a friend to keep costs down. Johnson’s stepfather joined the family later.
Early on, Johnson credited his mother with providing him with self-discipline and motivation that helped him to remain focused despite the racial discrimination he later felt and witnessed as a young boy. “My mother was the influence in my life,” said Johnson in an interview a year before his death from heart failure. “She was a strong woman and believed in justice. She believed that if you worked hard, you would achieve,” he said. “I knew very early on that I stood on the shoulders of many who came before me and I came to understood very quickly that these heroic Black men and women helped to carve out a space for me to grow and succeed.”1
Johnson honed his intellectual skills at DuSable High School in Chicago, eventually emerging as a student leader among his peers. Among his classmates were singer Nat King Cole, actor Redd Foxx, and future entrepreneur William Abernathy. Though he was later offered a scholarship to attend the University of Chicago, he never completed his studies there, focusing his energy instead on working for Chicago’s Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company. One of Johnson’s duties at the insurance company was to collect news and information about African Americans while preparing a weekly digest for Harry Pace, the company’s president.
It was while working at the insurance company that Johnson became convinced that there was an untapped market for an African American magazine. Over a period of several years, he worked tirelessly to try and develop a marketing and business plan for such a publication. He wanted his magazine, like the Chicago Defender, to have a national audience, read by political newsmakers as well as ordinary African Americans. He did not favor an “objective” magazine. From the very beginning, he wanted the publication to be driven by an advocacy agenda.
A year after marrying Eunice Walker, a native Alabaman whose father was a doctor and whose mother was a high-school principal and a college instructor, Johnson mortgaged his mother’s furniture for a meager $500 so he could pay for his first direct mail advertising about his magazine, Negro Digest, which he launched in 1942. The letter that Johnson sent out to the public offered subscriptions at two dollars each and he eventually managed to bring in 3,000 subscribers. When the 5,000 printed copies did not sell out, he asked thirty of his friends to inquire about the magazine at local newsstands in order to create a demand. Modeled after the popular Readers’ Digest, within eight months, Negro Digest reached $50,000 a month in sales. The magazine featured articles about the growing social inequities in the United States and provided a platform for African Americans to read about a wide range of critical issues such as housing discrimination and the reported cases of lynchings in the South. Still, with few resources, Johnson set up his publishing company on the second floor of Chicago’s Supreme Life Insurance Company building and assumed the title of both editor and publisher. Though he had no journalistic background, he would assign and edit the news stories and actively run the business operation, which primarily focused on generating advertising revenue.
By October 1942, the readership of Negro Digest continued to soar, with 100,000 copies of the magazine being sold. It had a readership that extended far beyond Chicago, an extended audience for which Johnson had hoped. Johnson was even able to convince First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to write a column entitled “If I was a Negro.” In the piece, Roosevelt conceded that if she were Black, she would have experienced great bitterness as a citizen in the United States. After the column was published, people attacked Negro Digest as a Communist magazine and the column highlighted the racial plight that African Americans were forced to endure. Despite the controversy over the publication of Eleanor Roosevelt’s column, a young Johnson was also startled by the success that the magazine had generated and, over time, he convinced Norman Thomas, Marshall Field, and other white political leaders to pen essays for the growing publication. “I was both surprised and shocked by its success, but realized that we had developed something extremely important to America. People were reading us,” he said.2
Soon after the magazine gained national prominence, writers began to flock to Johnson looking for an opportunity to publish their work. Freelance photographers followed in tow. They came from far and near for an opportunity to be published in the country’s most premier Black magazine. Among writers associated with the era are Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank Marshall Davis, William Attaway, Frank London Brown, Willard Motley, Theodore Ward, Frank Yerby, and Lorraine Hansberry, all of whom either published in or sought to publish in Johnson’s magazine. The Black Chicago Renaissance was fueled by two unprecedented social and economic conditions: the “great migration” of Southern Blacks to Chicago in search of economic opportunity and perceived safety from lynch mob rule, and the crisis of the Great Depression that followed. Johnson’s Negro Digest provided a valuable local and national outlet for a number of writers associated with the Chicago Renaissance to express their ideas.
By this time, there were dozens of Black newspapers across the country like the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier and the New York Amsterdam News, but the idea of a Black national magazine was relatively new. While Crisis, the publication of the NAACP and Opportunity, the publication of the National Urban League existed, some viewed these publications as mere tools for the civil rights organizations that were deeply political and some did not feel that the magazines adequately portrayed Black life in the United States outside of the struggle for civil rights.
The widespread support that Johnson received from African Americans ultimately enabled him to purchase the company’s first building at 5619 South State Street in Chicago. It was there that he launched the magazine Ebony, named by his wife Eunice. Ebony is currently the oldest continuously running African American magazine in the country. The magazine, which was launched in 1945, was initially targeted to the Black middle class, but quickly became a popular item in most Black homes, as well as in barber shops, beauty salons, and the offices of Black physicians and dentists. The magazine transcended class differences. Its mission specifically was to train a spotlight on the achievements and successes of African Americans at a time in which Black accomplishments were largely ignored by mainstream media. The magazine prominently featured pictures and long-range profiles of African Americans graduating from college and Black couples getting married, and showcased African American births, as well as their academic and scientific achievements. Johnson broke new ground by bringing positive portrayals of Blacks into a mass-market publication and encouraging corporations to use Black models in advertising aimed at Black consumers.
Early on, Ebony was barely surviving when Johnson’s pursuit of advertisers landed him ads from Zenith Corporation. With a major white radio manufacturing firm on board, others soon followed and the magazine thrived, so much so that it was joined by other Johnson Publishing Company products: Jet, Ebony Man, Tan Confessions, Copper Romance, Ebony Jr., and Ebony International. Today, only Ebony and Jet are published.
As a show of his persistence, in the mid-1940s, Johnson sent an ad salesman to Detroit every week for ten years before an auto manufacturer agreed to advertise in Ebony. “We couldn’t do it then by marching, and we couldn’t do it by threatening,” Johnson said of gaining advertisers. “We had to persuade people that it was in their best interest to reach out to Black consumers in a positive way. We knew that we had a product that was not inferior.”3 By the mid-sixties Ebony was riding a crest, featuring articles by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., journalist Carl T. Rowan, and Lerone Bennett Jr., whose scholarship and reputation as a public historian gave the publication additional cachet. There was some derision in the late sixties from activists, however, and eventually Black World, formerly Negro Digest, was shut down in April 1976.
The demise of one element of the Johnson Empire was soon replaced by other ventures, including the increasing popularity of the Ebony Fashion Fair, a division of Johnson Publishing Company that was started from scratch. With an idea and twenty bottles from a chemist, Johnson created the largest Black-owned cosmetics company in the world. The logic behind Johnson’s new venture was his belief that Black women’s needs had been ignored by the major cosmetics industries. He had argued that existing products were not marketed or sold to meet the particular needs of women of color. Many women with deeper skin tones were to choose from products that were clearly made with fair skin tones in mind. When Johnson noticed that models in the Fashion Fair, the company’s traveling fashion show, mixed foundations to create the right blend to match their hues, he was driven into action. First, Johnson approached existing cosmetics companies and urged them to create a line specifically to meet the needs of Black women. When no one took up the challenge, Johnson and his wife decided instead to take the matter into their own hands. They went to a private lab that created permanent formulas out of the mixtures the models had been making.
After experimenting by using the makeup on the models in the fashion show, the Johnsons produced a mail-order package called the Capsule Collection in 1969. The response was overwhelming. It became clear almost immediately that there was a market for a Black cosmetics line. Fashion Fair Cosmetics was born in 1973, named after the fashion show that inspired it. The line was marketed to high-line department stores and opened its first counter in Chicago at Marshall Fields on State Street. Today, Fashion Fair is the world leader in the field of cosmetics for all women of color and its products are sold in stores across the United States as well as in Canada, Africa, the Caribbean, England, France, and other countries around the world.
Though Johnson ventured into cosmetics, his passion remained publishing. He had transformed the industry so much that he was affectionately called the godfather of African American publishing. In this capacity, he built Ebony from a circulation of 25,000 on its first press run in November 1945 to a monthly circulation of 1.9 million in 1997. Ebony was launched just after World War II, as African American soldiers were returning home. At the time, there were no African American players in major league baseball and virtually no Black political representation holding city, state and national office. In fact, civil rights leader Roy Wilkins of the NAACP strongly encouraged Johnson not to enter the publishing world, predicting failure for his venture. Wilkins later recanted and apologized to Johnson, telling the publisher that he underestimated his skills.
The success of Ebony was followed six years later by the creation of yet another magazine, which Johnson felt he could successfully market and sell to African Americans. In 1951, Jet, a pocket-sized weekly publication that highlighted news of African Americans in the social limelight, political arena, entertainment business, and sports world became popular almost immediately. The magazine, which is still in existence along with Ebony, has a readership of over eight million.
Jet’s coverage of Emmett Till’s killing is considered a major development in the civil rights movement. The magazine’s one photograph of Emmett Till, his body mutilated after being beaten by white men after he allegedly whistled at a white woman, exposed the entire Black community to the challenges of life for Blacks in the South, Johnson recounted. Johnson said that at the time, some on the Jet staff were squeamish about using the Till funeral photographs. “I had reservations, too, but I decided finally that if it happened, it was our responsibility to print it and let the world experience man’s inhumanity to man.”4
The popularity of Jet further pushed Johnson into other enterprises, adding to his lucrative empire. He would later start new magazine ventures, and publish books, including Lerone Bennett Jr.’s groundbreaking bestseller Before the Mayflower, a classic text. Additionally, he built several radio stations and became the majority owner in Supreme Liberty Life Insurance, the company that gave him his first career opportunity. In the 1950s, Johnson expanded his profile and became active in national politics. He began a long career of serving in special positions in both Republican and Democratic administrations. In 1957, he accompanied Vice President Richard M. Nixon on a special goodwill tour to nine African countries and was a part of his delegation two years later when he toured Russia and Poland. President John F. Kennedy appointed Johnson as Special U.S. Ambassador to the Independence Ceremonies of the Ivory Coast in 1961, a position he would serve for two years until he was appointed in 1963 as Special U.S. Ambassador to the Independence Ceremonies of Kenya.
Johnson was an investor in Essence magazine, founded in 1970, which soon became the most successful magazine for African American women, one of the last Black-owned magazines with a national following. In 2002, the magazine was sold to Time Warner Corporation. The sale of Essence essentially left Johnson as the lone African American publisher of a major publication. In 1972, Johnson was named Publisher of the Year by the Magazine Publishers Association. In 1974, the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a consortium of Black publications, named him the “Most Outstanding Black Publisher in History.” In 2003, Baylor University named him the “The Greatest Minority Entrepreneur in U.S. History.” In that same year, Howard University named its communications school the John H. Johnson School of Communications after Johnson made a financial donation of $4 million to the historically Black college.
Despite his ailing health, Johnson did not slow down. He occupied the top floor of the office building that he purchased in downtown Chicago. In fact, Johnson was also the first African American to build a major building in downtown Chicago where his publishing empire is housed. In 1982, he became the first African American to appear on the Forbes list of 400 wealthiest Americans, though, as he liked to remind people, back in the 1930s in Chicago his family made only the welfare list. He was recognized for his philanthropy and lauded for his giving to Black organizations and also served on many advisory commissions at the local, state, and federal levels. In addition, he served on the boards of a number of major corporations and educational, cultural, and philanthropic organizations. In his 1989 autobiography, Succeeding Against the Odds, Johnson wrote: “no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I’m always looking for opportunities to make money.”5 By 1990, Johnson’s personal wealth was estimated at $150 million, making Johnson’s Publishing Company the largest Black-owned publishing company in the world.
In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of Ebony, Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, from President Bill Clinton. At the ceremony, Clinton asserted that Johnson gave “African-Americans a voice and a face, in his words, ‘a new sense of somebody-ness,’ of who they were and what they could do, at a time when they were virtually invisible in mainstream American culture.” Johnson’s business success and his involvement in the community won him invitations to serve on the board of directors of major American corporations. He served first on the board of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and later on the boards of companies such as VIAD, Chrysler, Zenith, Conrail, Bell and Howell, Continental Bank, and Dillard Department Stores. He served as a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, the United Negro College Fund, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Time after time, he was credited as one of the trailblazers in business and international media and is acknowledged as the first entrepreneur to recognize the colossal buying power of Black America.
“Retirement is not in this company’s vocabulary,” said Johnson. “I am firmly of the belief that if you are well and able to work, you can stay at the company and that’s what I plan to do. I have never imagined doing anything but working. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t know what to do.” On August 8, 2005, Johnson died at the age of 87. He was working in his office just a few days before he was hospitalized and died.
His funeral at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago drew over 2,000 people, including President Bill Clinton. But the news coverage of Johnson’s death was also scrutinized. African Americans leaders felt that mainstream media did not adequately cover Johnson’s death. Only a handful of newspapers placed Johnson on the front page. Most newspapers, however, had no front-page story but referred to a piece on Johnson inside the paper, sometimes using a front-page photo. Those papers included the Los Angeles Times, California’s San Jose Mercury News, Florida’s Tampa Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, Minnesota’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, Mississippi’s Biloxi Sun-Herald, the Kansas City Star, the New York Times, the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., Texas’s Austin American-Statesman, the Dallas Morning News, and USA Today.
Papers that gave Johnson no front-page presence at all included many of the mainstream papers that have African American editors in top positions. They included the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, which had initiated coverage, three months before his death, of Johnson’s return to Arkansas City, where he grew up in the 1920s, and where his hometown and state helped turn his childhood home into a museum. The state of Arkansas turned his boyhood home into a museum. The John H. Johnson Delta Cultural Entrepreneurial Learning Center was designed to educate youngsters about Johnson’s life. Of the three broadcast networks, “CBS Evening News” and “NBC Nightly News” both gave Johnson short mentions on the nightly newscasts Monday—57 words on CBS and 66 on NBC. There was no mention on ABC’s “World News Tonight.”
Johnson, who retained the titles of chairman and publisher until his death, made Johnson Publishing a family business. His mother, Gertrude, was a vice president of the firm until her death in 1977; her office remains as she left it. His wife, Eunice W. Johnson, is secretary-treasurer. His daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, held several positions before she became CEO.
Like other powerful men, Johnson had his fair share of critics. Some former employees said he was a tough, hard-driven boss who spent too much time focused on the bottom line. In fact, he was once quoted as saying, or joking, as he offered later in his defense, that he would push over a ten-story building on a baby if it meant stopping a threat to his business. And despite his success, over the years some Blacks complained that Ebony was too oriented toward the middle class and skirted hard news in favor of success stories. In recent years, the magazine has largely focused on covering Black celebrities. Johnson himself acknowledged that “we don’t rush to print critical things about Black leaders—even if it’s true,”6 acknowledging that the magazine ignored the missteps and shortcomings of Black political leaders.
Despite his detractors, however, Johnson received an impressive list of honors from America’s most prestigious educational institutions. During his lifetime, he received honorary degrees from thirty-one colleges, including Harvard, Howard, and Northwestern Universities, a major recognition for someone who did not even graduate from college.
“The tallest tree in the history of African American journalism has fallen, but has fallen gracefully,” said civil rights leader Rev. Jesse L. Jackson who spoke at Johnson’s funeral. “The tree that stood tall for over sixty years and a tree that planted a forest, a tree with widespread limbs and full of fruit. He connected to Africa and African Americans. He shared the pain of Emmett Till, the development of Martin Luther King Jr., and was a source of information and inspiration. He was the number one black publisher for sixty years. His impact had been felt through the whole world of journalism.”7
1. Interview with John H. Johnson, July 17, 2004.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Johnson, John H. Succeeding Against the Odds: The Autobiography of a Great Businessman. New York: Amistad, 1993.
6. Johnson, interview with author, July 17, 2004.
7. Interview with Jesse L. Jackson, September 13, 2005.
Finkle, Lee. Forum for Protest: The Black Press during World War II. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975.
Johnson, John H. Succeeding Against the Odds: The Autobiography of a Great Businessman. New York: Amistad, 1993.
Interview with Jesse L. Jackson, September 13, 2005.
Interview with John H. Johnson, July 17, 2004.
Simmons, Charles A. The African American Press: With Special References to Four Newspapers, 1827–1965. New York: McFarland, 1998.
Streitmatter, Roger. Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.