John H. Johnson

John Harold Johnson was born on the nineteenth of January 1918 at Arkansas City, Arkansas, the only child of Leroy Johnson — a sawmill worker who was killed in a 1924 sawmill accident — and Gertrude Jenkins Johnson, a domestic worker. He was raised by his mother and stepfather in the small Mississippi River town through the depression of the Arkansas Delta sharecropping economy.

The family migrated north to Chicago in July 1933 — the fifteen-year-old Johnson, his mother, and his stepfather — and he was placed at the Wendell Phillips High School and subsequently the new DuSable High School at the South Side of Chicago. He completed DuSable in 1936 as the senior-class president and the editor of the school yearbook.

He took employment in 1936 at the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company at Chicago — the principal Black-owned insurance company of the American North — and worked his way through evening classes at the University of Chicago across the closing years of the 1930s. He rose by 1939 to assistant to the Supreme Liberty Life president Harry H. Pace.

He was assigned in 1939 the editing of the Supreme Liberty Life monthly company newsletter — the principal Black-community-news clipping service at the time of the period — and concluded by 1942 that the clipping service could be commercially developed as a Black-readership magazine modelled on the Henry Luce Reader’s Digest.

He founded in November 1942 the Johnson Publishing Company at Chicago — incorporated on a five-hundred-dollar loan secured by his mother’s home furniture — and on the first of November 1942 published the first issue of Negro Digest, the principal Black-readership monthly review of the war and the immediate post-war period.

He published on the first of November 1945 the first issue of Ebony — a Life-magazine-format monthly picture magazine for Black readers — which surpassed a circulation of five hundred thousand by 1950 and eight hundred thousand by 1953. Ebony was the principal Black-readership monthly picture magazine of the world for the following fifty-five years.

He published on the first of November 1951 the first issue of Jet — a pocket-sized weekly Black-news magazine — which carried in the issue of the fifteenth of September 1955 the open-casket funeral photographs of the murdered fourteen-year-old Emmett Till (placed in this archive). The Till funeral photographs were carried in no other American magazine of the period.

The Johnson Publishing Company surpassed by 1985 a gross annual revenue of two hundred million dollars and was at the time the principal Black-owned American media company.

He was awarded the 1996 Presidential Medal of Freedom on the eighth of August 1996.

He died at Chicago on the eighth of August 2005 of complications of heart failure, at eighty-seven.

He is honored here as the publisher of Ebony and Jet.