August 11, 2005

Johnson's media empire gave African Americans a 'sense of somebodiness'

Betty Baye
Louisville Courier-Journal

When the African-American weekly Jet published my photograph and a line from my first Courier-Journal column in 1991 — "I've walked gracefully in high heels through doors kicked open by barefoot people with little or no education" — word quickly spread throughout Manhattan's East River Houses: "Little Betty's in the Jet. Little Betty's in the Jet."

My family and a lot of people who had watched me grow up in the projects were proud. And it's still a big deal in black America when something that you've said or done warrants a mention in one of John H. Johnson's publications.

Johnson died Monday of heart failure in Chicago. He was 87. Black journalists everywhere are mourning his passing because Johnson was one of our Big Daddies

Roy Johnson (no relation), assistant manager editor of Sports Illustrated, wrote in the historic black newspaper The Chicago Defender that "John H. Johnson will always stand as the bridge linking Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells to Oprah Winfrey."

Ordinarily, The Defender doesn't publish on Tuesdays, but Johnson's death was too significant for the presses not to roll.

In their editorial, The Defender's editors noted that in the 1950s, when "white America deemed black America poor and uneducated," Johnson's publications "focused on a growing black middle-class - educated, accomplished, successful and beautiful."

Johnson began building his media empire in 1942 with $500 he was able to secure using his mother's furniture as collateral. Negro Digest, his first offering, was fashioned after Reader's Digest.

Johnson never apologized for his agenda, pure and simple, of showing off black people in their best light through his various publications, including Negro Digest, Black World, Ebony, Jet and Ebony Man.

His lifelong missions were to give black subscribers news that generally went uncovered by the mainstream media, to single out for praise the African-American "firsts" in government, politics, business and industry, sports and the arts, and, as he once said, to give black people "a new sense of somebodiness."

Every black leader of any significance, including African heads of state, beat paths to Johnson's door to solicit his counsel, to solicit contributions to their causes or sometimes just to say thanks for the publicity.

Jet struck its deepest chord, however, when it published graphic photos of the horribly mutilated body of the Chicago teenager Emmett Till, who had been kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

Jet's coverage of Till's execution was a watershed in the civil rights movement.

Later, in the 1960s, one of the raps against Ebony in particular was that it over-emphasized celebrity and materialism. But as quiet as it was kept, Johnson's Black World regularly churned out edgy political and social critiques.

That's why, most likely, while the bigger and slicker Ebony, which incidentally survives its white role models, Life and Look, appealed to white advertisers, Black World carried hardly any advertising other than for Johnson's own products.

Clearly, Black World wasn't a huge money-maker, but Johnson kept publishing it until 1976.

Further proof that he wasn't stuck on fluff journalism is that Lerone Bennett has been a top editor in the Johnson publishing empire for 53 years. A fellow Southerner but 10 years Johnson's junior, Bennett is a prolific writer and social historian.

His essays on African-American history originally published in Ebony are collector's items, and many formed the basis for Bennett's perennial bestseller, Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America 1619-1962. Revised in 2000, the book was originally published by the Johnson Publishing Co. in 1962.

John H. Johnson made his fortune off the nickels, dimes, quarters, dollars and dreams of his African-American readers, the African-American listeners to the three radio stations he once owned, including Louisville's WLOU, and the African Americans who buy Fashion Fair Cosmetics, which Johnson and his wife, Eunice, launched in 1973, which today can be found in most fine department stores and which remains one of very few black-owned beauty lines.

Ebony has significantly more competition today for African Americans' attention. But all who publish, write in or model for black-oriented magazines should know that John H. Johnson kicked open the doors that we now walk through gracefully.

Johnson's place in the pantheon of trailblazing American entrepreneurs and African-American journalists is secure. He'll be greatly missed.