Throughout the twentieth century, most mainstream U.S. publications were reticent to bring more than one — if any — Black photographers on staff, resulting a biased depiction of the issues facing the Black America. Understanding the truth in journalist H. L. Mencken’s dictum, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one,” businessman John Harold Johnson founded the Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago in 1942 to provide Black America with media made by, for, and about the community.
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In 1945, the Johnson Publishing Company launched Ebony, which quickly became Black America’s answer to LIFE magazine. Rather than appropriate white culture, Ebonyoffered an inside view into a striving Black bourgeois through a series of photo essays and features on celebrities and current events. For 75 years, Ebony was the forerunner of Black American culture, chronicling the times, and offering a visual history of the nation from segregation through Civil Rights, and beyond.
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“As one of the few individuals who know of a world before Ebony, let me tell you, John Johnson’s magazine was a game-changer, and remains one to this day,” retired educator Hazel S. Red says in Lavaille Lavette’s sumptuous new book Ebony: Covering Black America (Rizzoli New York). “It has been a vehicle by which we have maintained our dignity and sanity through our efforts to achieve true justice and equality for all.”
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