Last week, John H. Johnson, the founder and leader of Johnson Publishing Co., the world’s largest African-American-owned and -operated publishing house, died at 87.
Johnson was born to an impoverished family in Arkansas. His father, a sawmill operator, was killed in a mill accident when Johnson was 8. His mother worked as a domestic, cleaning the laundry of others. From this beginning, Johnson made a fortune in publishing, and built the largest black-owned office building in America, on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.
In history, some succeed within a social context. But giants succeed by changing the social context.
In the midst of segregation, with the stereotypical media portrayal of African-Americans as shiftless, impoverished, downtrodden, ignorant and ugly, Johnson saw a people of beauty, of potential and of dignity. He decided to start a magazine that would hold a mirror to that reality. As an African American, he couldn’t get a loan to start a business, so his mother put her new furniture up as collateral for a $500 loan.
Johnson then started the Negro Digest, digesting articles of black authors. As black soldiers returned from World War II, he started Ebony and then Jet in 1951. He could get no advertising for the magazines, so he sold subscriptions. He built Ebony to a subscription base of over 1.9 million by 1997, and Jet to nearly a million.
“We wanted to give blacks a sense of sombodiness,” Johnson said, “a new sense of self-respect. We wanted to tell them who they were and what they could do.”
The effect was electric. African Americans eagerly awaited the next issue of Ebony and Jet. They proudly displayed them on their coffee tables. Black leaders and actors knew it was more important to appear in Jet than in the New York Times.
Johnson transformed the way we saw ourselves. He challenged centuries of oppression. Having created the kindling for the Civil Rights Movement, Johnson helped create the spark in 1955, when Jet published the photo of Chicago teenager Emmett Till’s battered face after he was lynched in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
Johnson also exposed a market that none believed was there. For 10 years, he sent a salesman to Detroit until finally the auto companies realized it was worth advertising with black models in his publications.
When he was a child, Johnson went to the Negro Country School in Arkansas. In those days, education for blacks stopped at 8th grade. So Johnson’s mother packed up and took her son to Chicago, where he could continue his education. Then she had the faith to put up the furniture to invest in her son. What an extraordinary return on that investment she – and all of us – received.