By: Marc H. Morial
President
National Urban League
"I thought my way out of poverty," said John H. Johnson, the founder and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines and the business empire they spawned who died August 8 at age 87. "Ebony was my passport."
There can be no doubt that while Johnson was at that moment speaking only for himself, the reference actually applies much more broadly.
Ebony magazine, and all the subsequent products of the Johnson empire, were our passport into the modern era—and by "our" I mean the whole of American society.
For what John H. Johnson did, beginning in the early 1940s, was to intensify through his fledgling publications the powerful spirit—the pursuit of freedom—then coursing through Black America. He did that merely by covering the life of both ordinary and extraordinary African Americans in what was then a revolutionary fashion for most American media: not as figments of the white-racist imagination but as human beings.
Johnson's pursuit and his impact were only fitting because he himself was a creation of the forces that in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century forged modern Black America. Arkansas-born, Johnson and his widowed mother, like millions of blacks, became part of the great waves of the Black Migrations, fleeing the racially-stultifying South for the urban north—Chicago—in the early 1930s.
In many ways, of course, for African Americans the North during these decades was little better than the South.
But in the difference lay opportunity, and that would make all the difference for those African Americans like Johnson who were determined to think their way out of poverty and discrimination. For him the "thinking" including college at the University of Chicago, and, perhaps more important, mixing in the vibrant and still largely-separate black and white communities of Chicago, and absorbing the meaning of the racial ferment occurring throughout the country during the 1930s and 1940s.
These were the years when lawyers Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall were crafting the legal strategies that would ultimately destroy government-sanctioned racial discrimination; when Jesse Owens and Joe Louis and, later, Jackie Robinson, were compelling whites to see that blacks, too, could be "American" sports heroes; when Marian Anderson offered dramatic proof that artistry knows no color barriers; and when civil rights activists demanded during World War Two that blacks be involved in the fight against fascism on equal terms.
Johnson's publications, Ebony and Jet, reached farther into Black America than black-owned newspapers and with their national coverage, forged and knit together a much broader, better-informed readership.
In this way, these two "Bibles" of Black America both helped stimulate the new mass-action civil rights movement then taking shape and signaled White America to prepare for the "New Negroes" coming to claim their full American citizenship.
Johnson's entrepreneurial vision and his overcoming the odds to start and build his publications reflected the interior landscape of Black America—its intelligence and shrewdness; its toughness and resourcefulness, and its determination to grasp the full measure of its American citizenship
In a truly American sense, of course, John Johnson was a classic example of that hardy breed—the entrepreneur—who sees a consumer need and moves astutely to respond to it.
It's America's great fortune that the "consumer need" he focused his attention on had at its core purpose the expansion of democracy—the making of modern-day America.
John H. Johnson, once poor and born into a world in which the larger society demanded that African Americans be poor, became enormously wealthy. But it's the United States of America that is much the richer for his talents and accomplishments.
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