John H. Johnson

American publisher and businessman

• Born: January 19, 1918
• Birthplace: Arkansas City, Arkansas
• Died: August 8, 2005
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Johnson turned a $500 loan into a $300 million fortune, eventually becoming one of the most successful African American businesspeople and one of the wealthiest people in the United States. His business ventures created new opportunities for African Americans and helped establish a more positive image of black people.

Sources of wealth: Media; manufacturing

Bequeathal of wealth: Spouse; children; charity

Early Life

John Harold Johnson, the son of Leroy and Gertrude Johnson, was born in rural Arkansas City, Arkansas, in 1918, a third-generation descendant of slaves. His father died in a sawmill accident when Johnson was six years old. His mother, who later married James Williams, worked as a washerwoman and a cook for the laborers in the levee camps along the Mississippi River. After finishing eighth grade at Arkansas City Colored School, Johnson chose to repeat it because there was no high school for African Americans in his community. In 1933, his mother decided to join the migration of southern blacks to the North, hoping for a better life during the Great Depression. The family settled in Chicago and found themselves dependent on welfare for two years. His mother subsequently worked in a New Deal public works program, and Johnson found a part-time job in the National Youth Administration.

First Ventures

Johnson attended Du Sable High School, where he made the honor roll and served as student council president and editor of the school newspaper and the class yearbook. Graduating in 1936, he was offered a scholarship that would pay his tuition to attend the University of Chicago. He was invited to speak at an Urban League dinner, where he met Harry H. Pace, the president of the Supreme Life Insurance Company. Pace offered Johnson a job that would pay his living expenses, and Johnson accepted. Johnson worked as a part-time office boy for the Guardian, the company’s in-house newsletter. Within two years he became the newsletter’s editor. One of his duties was to look for newspaper articles concerning issues of interest to the black community and report what he found to Pace. It was this job at the large African American-owned business that gave Johnson the dream of starting some kind of publishing business.

Johnson attended college part time, but after a while he decided to discontinue his studies. In 1941, he married Eunice Walker. Having no children of their own, they later adopted two children: a son, who died of sickle cell anemia at the age of twenty-five, and a daughter named Linda. Johnson finally came up with the idea of publishing a magazine called Negro Digest patterned on the Reader’s Digest. When none of the banks would lend him money, his mother let him use her furniture as collateral. As a result, the Citizens Loan Corporation agreed to lend him $500. With this seed money to buy postage and with Pace’s permission to use the Supreme Life mailing list, Johnson asked twenty thousand insurance policyholders for $2 each to subscribe to what was still a nonexistent magazine. After three thousand people subscribed, the first issue of Negro Digest was published in June, 1942.

Johnson’s office was located in a room in the private law office of Earl B. Dickerson on the second floor of the Supreme Life building. Since his magazine was unknown, he turned to his friends and fellow workers for help. They went to newsstands on Chicago’s South Side and kept asking for the magazine, convincing distributors to take on Negro Digest. When the magazines appeared at the newsstands, Johnson’s friends and colleagues returned and bought all of the issues with Johnson’s money, thus creating another cycle of supply and demand. Johnson repeated this scheme in other cities, such as Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia. Articles in Negro Digest were concerned with racial issues and provided aspiring African American writers the chance to contribute and be published. Later on, the magazine published a series of articles, “If I Were a Negro,” written by whites. After First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt contributed to the series, Negro Digest’s circulation rose to 50,000 a month, eventually reaching a maximum of more than 100,000.

Mature Wealth

After founding Negro Digest, Johnson published a number of other magazines during the following decade. Ebony, founded in 1945, and Jet, first published in 1951, continued to be widely read into the twenty-first century, but some of his other magazines—Hue, Copper, Tan, Ebony Africa, and Ebony Jr.—enjoyed only temporary success and were eventually discontinued. Negro Digest, which became Black World, was also discontinued when its circulation declined to fifteen thousand a month. In 1985, Johnson founded Ebony Man, or EM, which covers men’s fashions, grooming, and fitness. Johnson published not only magazines but also books by African American authors. His company’s first book was published in 1963, and he eventually issued more than forty titles in various genres. His autobiography, Succeeding Against the Odds, published in 1989, was a best seller.

In addition to Ebony and Jet, two other important products helped contribute to Johnson’s wealth—the Fashion Fair shows and Fashion Fair Cosmetics. Fashion Fair, which for many years was directed by his wife Eunice Johnson, is considered the world’s largest traveling fashion show and continued to be staged into the twenty-first century. Johnson produced his first fashion show in 1956, when he was asked to sponsor a minifashion show fund-raiser for a New Orleans hospital. He created Fashion Fair two years later, and the fashion shows eventually traveled to almost two hundred cities every year, with more than four thousand shows presented in the United States, the Caribbean, Jamaica, and London. The show attracts hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Fashion Fair Cosmetics originated because there was a need for makeup for the dark-skinned models who participated in Fashion Fair. Since such companies as Revlon and Estée Lauder were not interested in manufacturing makeup for women of color, Johnson turned to a private laboratory that created the first chemical formulas for the models. To sell his cosmetics to the public, Johnson promptly produced a mail-order package called the Capsule Collection in 1969. Fashion Fair Cosmetics was established four years later and remained the world leader in makeup and skin care products for women of color. In 2010, the firm’s products were sold in fifteen hundred stores in the United States, Canada, France, the Caribbean, and other countries. Johnson also launched Supreme Beauty Products, two hair care products for men called Duke and one for women named Raven.

Johnson increased his wealth by investing in the communications business. He acquired three radio stations: WJPC-AM in Chicago, Illinois, in 1972; WLOU-AM in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1982; and WLNR-FM in Lansing, Illinois, in 1985. His radio broadcasting company, Johnson Communications, had estimated annual sales of $1.6 million. Johnson also was a major shareholder in Essence, a magazine for African American women. In 1974, he acquired a majority interest in Supreme Life Insurance and later became chairman and chief executive officer of the company.

Thanks to his prosperous businesses, Johnson was able to buy an office building on Michigan Avenue, a prestigious location in Chicago, becoming the first black businessman to be located in the city’s “loop.” After forty years in business, Johnson became the first African American to appear on the Forbes magazine Rich List in 1982, with his fortune estimated at about $500 million. He never disclosed his personal holdings, but he was estimated to have about $150 million in 1990. Some trappings of his wealth included a Rolls-Royce; a mountaintop home in Palm Springs, California; and a condominium on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. Johnson was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, and he held a number of positions in civic and business organizations. Besides being inducted into several halls of fame, he received the Medal of Freedom Award for giving black Americans a voice through his publications. In 2003, he donated $4 million to Howard University, which named its school of communications after him. Since their founding, his Fashion Fair shows have provided more than $50 million worth of scholarships for African American students.

Johnson died in 2005 of congestive heart failure at the age of eighty-seven. He was survived by his wife Eunice Johnson, who died in 2010, and his daughter Linda Johnson Rice, who serves as chair and chief executive officer of Johnson Publishing, which remained a family-owned business.

Legacy

John H. Johnson’s life was truly a rags-to-riches story. He had the courage to dream and the intelligence to accept the opportunities that made his dream come true in the face of segregation and racism. With creativity, determination, and business savvy, he developed a leading black-owned publishing company and other successful businesses, all of which were privately held, family-owned, and family-operated. He blazed the trail for other black-oriented magazines, such as Black Enterprise, Essence, and Emerge. He also played a key role in launching and promoting the careers of a large number of African American professionals in publishing and advertising. By showcasing black culture in a positive light through Jet and Ebony, he created a legacy that celebrated the achievement and beauty of African Americans.

Bibliography

Dingle, Derek T.“Black Enterprise” Titans of the “Black Enterprise 100’s”: Black CEOs Who Redefined and Conquered American Business. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999. Examines eleven leaders of the largest black-owned businesses and reveals the secrets of how they beat the odds and the challenges they have faced.

Johnson, John H. “Interview with John H. Johnson.” Interview by Lerone Bennett, Jr. Ebony, November, 1985, 44-58. Johnson’s life in his own words.

Johnson, John H., with Lerone Bennett, Jr. Succeeding Against the Odds. New York: Warner Books, 1989. Johnson recounts his life and business career in his autobiography.

Kinnon, Joy Bennett. “Celebrating the Life and Legacy of John H. Johnson, 1918-2005.” Ebony, October, 2005, 53-71. Brief obituary published after Johnson’s death.

Mitchell, Karen. Castor Oil and Orange Juice: How John H. Johnson Fed News to Black America. 2007. Available at http://edt.missouri.edu/Fd/2007/Thesis/MitchellK-120707-T9210/research.pdf. A thesis presented to the faculty of the graduate school of journalism at the University of Missouri. Describes how Johnson succeeded in constructing a broader image of African Americans by publishing stories about black Americans in all walks of life.