August 12, 2005

Remembering Mr. J.

Elmer Smith
Philadelphia Daily News

By the time Warren Brown met him, John H. Johnson had built a publishing empire and a fortune from $500 he had borrowed on his mother's furniture.

But, from what Brown could tell, Johnson didn't know enough or care enough about hard news to fill one of the pages of his pocket-sized Jet magazines.

This was 1970. Brown, who had a journalism degree from Columbia and experience at the New York Times, was one of the bright young journalists Johnson hired to produce his Ebony and Jet magazines.

"We were young, hip, black and smart," Brown recalled. "We had Ivy League degrees. We wanted to write the kind of stories black America needed."

They wanted to transform Jet, which had built a circulation of more than a million on tidbits about black celebrities and other fluff, into a hard-news weekly like Time or Newsweek.

"He let us try it," Brown recalled. "We took all the celebrities off the cover and put hard news out front. We broke stories. It was good stuff."

But it "lasted about six weeks. Our circulation dropped every week. I mean it went way down. Then he put the entertainers and athletes back out front, and the circulation went right back up.

"He understood that what his audience needed was uplifting stories that tell what is going on in America through the eyes of black people.

"He had a tremendous impact. He funded projects and published books nobody else would."

Brown, who is now an automotive columnist for the Washington Post, a commentator on ABC Radio and an author, has come to appreciate the genius of the man he calls "Mr. J."

"Mr. J." died Monday. He was 87. Survivors include his wife of 64 years, Eunice W. Johnson; his daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, who runs the magazine empire he founded, and millions of loyal readers like me who still never miss an issue of Ebony or Jet.

His business empire includes magazines, radio and television stations, Ebony Fashion Fair Cosmetics and a publishing firm that has published dozens of scholarly books on the history and sociology of black America.

The Ebony Fashion Fair, a sumptuously staged, touring fashion show, has contributed more than $50 million in scholarships, the Washington Post estimated this week. Howard University alone, which renamed its school of communications for him, has received millions of dollars from Johnson's foundation.

Dozens of renowned journalists and authors got their start at Johnson Publications.

Johnson was the first black man to make Forbes magazine's list of the wealthiest 400 Americans and was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

This from a grandson of slaves whose family struggled to get by on welfare after his father died while John H. Johnson was still in grade school in Arkansas.

He could have written volumes about the deprivations of poverty and the indignities of racism. Instead he chose to highlight the accomplishments of those who overcame the odds. Ebony has taken us inside the homes and lifestyles of many of the most successful black Americans in the 60 years since its founding.

Jet kept us in touch with the lives of the celebrities that black Americans and now all Americans like to gossip about. He provided a glimpse of the good life that readers could only fantasize about when he started but that many aspire to and even achieve today.

Along the way, his publications chronicled the social upheavals of our time and became a catalyst for the civil rights and economic-empowerment movements that lifted the masses of black people from poverty.

He may not have known or cared very much about hard news or communications theory.

But nobody knew or served his people better than "Mr. J" did.

Elmer Smith is associate editor of the opinion pages at the Philadelphia Daily News. Readers may write to him at the Daily News, 400 North Broad St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19130, or via e-mail at smithel@phillynews.com.