Johnson, John Harold

▪ 2006

      American business executive and publisher (b. Jan. 19, 1918, Arkansas City, Ark.—d. Aug. 8, 2005, Chicago, Ill.), parlayed a $500 loan, secured against his mother's furniture, into one of the largest media empires in the United States. He was the grandson of slaves, and the harsh conditions of the Jim Crow-era South forced his family to move to Chicago when he was 15. After graduating from high school, Johnson took a job at Supreme Life Insurance Co., where he launched his first publishing venture. In 1942 he solicited 20,000 Supreme Life policyholders for advance subscriptions to Negro Digest, a monthly magazine that was patterned on the popular Reader's Digest but focused on stories and events within the African American community. Within a year Negro Digest had 50,000 paid subscribers, and Johnson had found his audience. His next publication, Ebony, debuted in November 1945. Modeled on Life magazine, Ebony was an immediate success with readers, but advertisers were initially reluctant to target what they saw as an unproven market. Skyrocketing circulation numbers and personal meetings with Johnson, however, soon convinced them of the buying power of the growing black middle class. Another Johnson publication, Jet, hit newsstands in 1951 and sparked a controversy when, in 1955, it ran an open-casket picture of Emmett Till—a 14-year-old boy who was abducted and brutally murdered for allegedly having whistled at a white woman. Johnson's business expanded to include Fashion Fair Cosmetics, a line of makeup products for women of colour, as well as a book-publishing division. In 1982 he became the first African American to appear on Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest Americans, and in 1996 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His company, Johnson Publishing, was valued at close to $500 million at the time of his death.

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