Business legend John H. Johnson succumbs in Chicago

Jet, August 22, 2005

John H. Johnson, who borrowed $500 on his mother's furniture and created a publishing and cosmetics empire that changed the color and content of American media, died recently at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He was 87.

The founder and publisher of EBONY and JET Magazines and the chairman of Johnson Publishing Company and Fashion Fair Cosmetics succumbed after an extended illness on the 60th anniversary of EBONY Magazine, which, under his leadership, has been the biggest Black-owned magazine in the world for 60 consecutive years.

In 2002, Johnson named Linda Johnson Rice, who at that time was president and chief operating officer, to the position of CEO, but retained the title of chairman and publisher until his death.

Rice said her father was active in company affairs until his last illness "He was in his office every day until his last illness and was alert and active until the end. He was the greatest salesman and CEO I have ever known, but he was also a father, friend and mentor with a great sense of humor who never stopped climbing mountains and dreaming dreams."

Johnson, who was born in poverty, rose in one generation from the welfare rolls to the rolls of Forbes 400 richest Americans. He was the most honored of all publishers. He was a member of the Publishing Hall of Fame, the National Business Hall of Fame, the Advertising Hall of Fame and the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame, and he received the Spingarn Medal, the highest award of the NAACP, and the Salute to Greatness Award, the highest honor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center, for his contribution to civil rights.

In 1972, he was named Publisher of the Year by the Magazine Publishers Association. In 1974 he was named "The Most Outstanding Black Publisher in History" by the National Newspaper Publishers Association. In 2003, he was named "The Greatest Minority Entrepreneur in U.S. History" by Baylor University. In the same year, Howard University named its Journalism school the John H. Johnson School of Communications.

On the 50th anniversary of the founding of EBONY Magazine, the publisher received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, from President Bill Clinton, who said he gave "African Americans a voice and a face, in his words "a new sense of somebody-ness,' of who they were and what they could do, at a time when they were virtually invisible in mainstream American culture."

The secret of his success, by almost all accounts, was his indomitable tenacity of spirit and his refusal to take no for an answer. When he was refused permission to buy a lot in downtown Chicago because of his race, he hired a White lawyer who bought the land in trust, and he became the first African-American to build a major building in Chicago's Loop.

Defying all the odds was his passion and his motif. "Failure," he said "is a word I don't accept." In his best-selling autobiography, Succeeding Against the Odds, he said that the message of his life "to Blacks, to Hispanics, to Asians, to whites, to dreamers everywhere, (was) that long shots do come in and that hard work, dedication, and perseverance will overcome almost any prejudice and open almost any door."

Johnson was born in Arkansas City, AR, on January 19, 1918 to Leroy Johnson and Gertrude Jenkins Johnson. His father was killed in a sawmill accident when he was eight and his mother, who later married James Williams, became the dominant force in his life. "She believed in me and taught me to believe in myself," he said later. "She taught me to dream, to dare and to never give up." And it was his mother who decided early, even before he was aware of what she was thinking, that the Jim Crow Arkansas of that period was not a good place to raise a Black Child from whom she expected great deeds. There was no Black high school in Arkansas City then and Black parents with money sent their children away to high school. "My mother didn't have money to send me away to school, but she had a friend in Chicago. So she worked as a cook for a camp on the levee for two long years to save the money for the train trip to Chicago, where we lived with her friend while she looked for work and I went to High school," he recalled.

Johnson and his mother left Arkansas City in July 1933 and were joined later by his stepfather.

Johnson and his mother moved to Chicago at the Height of The Great Depression and they were on the welfare rolls for a short period. But they got off welfare as soon as possible, he said in his autobiography, and "moved on to better times and better jobs."

Johnson graduated from DuSable High School in 1936 and worked at Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, the largest Black business in the North, while studying part-time at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. One of his duties at Supreme was to prepare a digest for President Harry H. Pace of Black or Black-oriented stories in the American press.

This gave him the idea for his first magazine, NEGRO DIGEST, but banks and financial institutions refused to give him a loan. Undaunted, he financed the first issue by borrowing $500 on his mother's furniture. The magazine, published for the first time in November 1942, was an instant success and led to the founding of EBONY Magazine in 1945 and at the end of World War II in his "lucky month" of November.