Johnson, John Harold

Impact on the world

Launching Negro Digest in 1942 by mailing subscription offers to 20,000 names from his employer's insurance-policy list, Johnson used the proceeds to found Ebony in 1945 and Jet in 1951, building magazines that at their peak reached a combined readership in the tens of millions and became indispensable chroniclers of Black American life, achievement, and the civil rights movement — Jet's publication of Emmett Till's open-casket funeral photograph in 1955 is widely credited with galvanizing national outrage that helped fuel the movement. Every U.S. president from Eisenhower onward met with Johnson, whom Lyndon Johnson once called “the only man who can get 20 million people to listen to you”; he expanded Johnson Publishing into book publishing, Fashion Fair Cosmetics (the largest Black-owned cosmetics company in the world), and the Ebony Fashion Fair traveling show, which raised over $47 million for the United Negro College Fund and other charities. In 1982 he became the first Black American to appear on the Forbes 400 list, and in 1996 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Life & background

Born January 19, 1918, in Arkansas City, Arkansas, to Leroy Johnson, who died in a sawmill accident when John was eight, and Gertrude Jenkins Johnson, a cook, Johnson moved with his family to Chicago in the early 1930s during the Great Migration after his mother determined he needed access to a Black high school, since none existed in Arkansas City at the time. He graduated with honors from DuSable High School and attended the University of Chicago while working at Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, where compiling a daily news digest on Black America for the company newsletter gave him the idea for Negro Digest. He appointed his daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, CEO of Johnson Publishing in 2002, and remained chairman until his death on August 8, 2005, in Chicago; the company's landmark Chicago headquarters received National Historic Landmark status in 2018, and its vast Ebony/Jet photo archive was acquired by the Smithsonian and Getty in 2022.

Sources

1. Encyclopedia of Arkansas; Encyclopædia Britannica; BlackPast.org