John H. Johnson was born in 1918 in Arkansas City, Arkansas, a third-generation descendant of enslaved people. He moved to Chicago with his family during the Great Depression and worked in insurance before deciding, in 1942, to start a magazine. He borrowed $500 using his mother’s furniture as collateral, mailed subscription offers to a mailing list, and used more than 3,000 completed responses to print the first issue of Negro Digest that November — a Reader’s Digest-style monthly summarizing news coverage of Black life. By mid-1943, circulation had reached 50,000.
Ebony followed in November 1945, patterned deliberately after Life magazine, and became the company’s defining publication — covering Black community, culture, and achievement at a scale nothing before it had reached, eventually topping 1.3 million readers. Johnson’s wife, Eunice, gave the magazine its name. Jet launched in 1951 as a pocket-sized weekly, and became something more than a magazine in September 1955, when it published photographs of the open casket of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Chicago boy beaten to death in Mississippi. Till’s mother, Mamie, had insisted on an open casket specifically so the world could see what had been done to her son; Jet’s decision to publish the images put that evidence in front of the entire country and is widely credited as a catalyzing moment for the civil rights movement that followed. Johnson later expanded into additional titles — Tan, Hue, Black Stars, Ebony Jr. — and built 820 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, the first African American-owned building in the city’s downtown, designed by Black architect John Moutoussamy and still the only Chicago high-rise designed by a Black architect.
Johnson’s business innovation extended beyond editorial content. He personally convinced major national corporations, many of whom had never advertised in a Black publication, to buy ad space in Ebony and Jet — building an advertising revenue base that mainstream publishers had assumed did not exist. At its peak in the 1990s, Johnson Publishing reported revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and Johnson himself became one of the most successful Black entrepreneurs in American history, appointing his daughter Linda Johnson Rice as CEO in 2002.
John H. Johnson died in 2005. The company’s fortunes declined afterward as the broader magazine industry struggled against digital competition. In 2016, Johnson Publishing sold Ebony and Jet to a private equity firm, ending 71 years of Johnson family ownership of the titles that had built the company. Johnson Publishing itself, now focused on its Fashion Fair Cosmetics line and its vast photo archive, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation in April 2019, citing the bankruptcy of a major retail partner and mounting digital competition. Both Ebony and Jet had become digital-only publications by 2021. In 2022, the company’s enormous photographic archive — millions of images documenting Black American life across seven decades — was purchased by a coalition of foundations specifically to keep it intact and publicly accessible, rather than see it broken up and sold piecemeal.