The Ebony revolution: magazine sparked major changes in perceptions and practice

Ebony, Nov, 2005 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

REVOLUTIONS come in different shapes, sizes and colors.

Some come shouting, with trumpets blaring, drums beating, and multitudes marching.

Some come silently, with whispers in the Soul, with 1 woman refusing to stand up on a segregated bus and 4 freshmen sitting down at a segregated lunch counter.

But however they come, and wherever they come, they are almost always preceded by the Revolution of the Word and by pictures and images preaching and testifyin' and signifying.

And to understand the revolution that EBONY helped to make and the revolution that history made in and through EBONY and its offsprings, you have to go back 60 Novembers to the first EBONY which said, among other things, that "a New World [Was] A-Coming."

The announcement came in a 52-page magazine that was a March on Washington on the level of images. For the new magazine broke through the White newsprint curtain and showed the human face of Black men and women. It showed Black men and women doing what men and women do, falling in love, getting married, going to parties, running businesses, raisin' hell, and writing books, and it proved by pictures that Black men and women could do anything in this world that other men and women could do.

This challenged the foundations of the world of 1945. For back there, at the end of World War II, segregation was triumphant almost everywhere and some people said it would last forever.

There were no Black mayors of major cities then, and there were no Blacks in Major League Baseball or major league football.

And some experts--you won't believe this--said there was something in the genes of Black people that made it impossible for them to play in the National Basketball Association.

But that was not all of it. For almost all American media, print and electronic, were engaged in a conspiracy to hide and devalue the Black personality. Looking back 44 years later, EBONY'S founder, John H. Johnson, said in his best-selling autobiography, Succeeding Against the Odds:

"If you had relied on the White press of that day, you would have assumed that Blacks were not born, because the White press didn't deal with our births.

"You would have assumed that we didn't finish high school, because the White press didn't deal with our educational achievements.

"You would have assumed that we didn't get married, because the White press didn't print our wedding announcements or pictures of Black brides and grooms cutting cakes.

"You would have assumed that we didn't die, because it didn't deal with our funerals."

This was the world that sparked the EBONY Revolution and shaped the EBONY declaration of independence for readers and consumers.

For EBONY was founded, Johnson said, to testify to a new and different world for Black and White Americans.

"In a world of negative Black images," he said, "we wanted to provide positive Black images.

"In a world that said Blacks could do few things, we wanted to say they could do everything."

And the founder went on to say something that has never been truly understood in this country: that the image is more than an incidental byproduct of struggle. For the image, properly understood, is the struggle. It is in and of itself a civil right.

For:

The image sees.

The image acts.

The image climbs the corporate ladder and goes to the House and the Senate and the White House.

This means, among other things, that if you want to change what men and women are doing, and not doing, you must first change the image they have of themselves and their situation.

In the beginning, the EBONY Revolution laid siege to the Bastille hiding the Black image and announced a permanent revolution--which is needed today as much as it was needed in 1945--to refresh, to free and to transform the consciousness of Blacks and Whites.

This was the first stone of the EBONY Revolution, and the second was like unto it. For by this time, 1945, the great Black weekly newspapers that had sustained and transformed us in the first phase of the struggle--and the great White dailies--had reached their peak and were giving way to the blitzkrieg of the photograph, first in Life and Look, and then on TV. And publishers, all publishers, faced the challenge of mastering the new technology or going to the wall.

The EBONY Revolution saved and transformed the Black press by marrying words and pictures in living color.

"The picture magazines of the 1940s," Johnson said, "did for the public what television did for the audiences of the '50s: they opened new windows in the mind and brought us face to face with the multicolored possibilities of man and woman. The more I dealt with photographs, the more I understood their importance. I didn't see it in the beginning--I don't think anyone is that clairvoyant. But as I went from one small success to another, step by step, I began to understand the revolutionary importance of the new journalism."

The third stone-step followed as a matter of course. The EBONY Revolution created the infrastructure, the advertising, circulation, and graphic arts foundation, that led to the Black media stars and Black magazines of today.