Media mogul lived for the challenge

“I believe …that living on the edge, living in and out through your fear is the summit of life, and that people who refuse to take that dare condemn themselves to a life of living death,’’ John H. Johnson in “The Soul of Success: Inspiring Quotations for Entrepreneurs.”

It was an edge back then. The lines were clearly drawn back in the forties, black and white, only crossing during the Civil Rights Movement, and even then, some 20 years later, the edge still had a bite. So when a young John Johnson had a business plan to start a magazine and asked a Chicago bank for $500, they told him what most blacks heard all the time, “No.”

It was 1942. As the story goes, Johnson went back to the bank, told them he wanted to instead go on vacation, and used his mother’s furniture as collateral. The rest is history.

Johnson took the money and sent a mailing to 20,000 potential subscribers. Three thousand of them returned $2 to subscribe to Negro Digest and Johnson was off and running.

In less than year, the magazine’s circulation jumped from 5,000 to 50,000, and that was before Ebony, Jet, Ebony Fashion Fair and all of the hair-care/fashion products combined to make Johnson and his publishing company worth an estimated $500 million.

Johnson, the founder of the world’s largest black owned publishing company, died on Monday from heart failure at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. He was 87.

He leaves behind a legacy only rivaled by such media moguls as David Sarnoff, the founder of NBC; William Paley, the founder of CBS; Ted Turner, the founder of CNN; and Henry Luce, the founder of Time Inc.

“From my personal story, people can learn that a good education and determination not to fail can be helpful,” Johnson said in a book about successful black Americans. “I say failure is a word that I don’t accept. I’ve just refused to fail, and as a result of that, I have succeeded.”

Indeed, Johnson beat the odds. The grandson of slaves, Johnson was born in 1918 in Arkansas City, Ark. When Johnson was eight years old, his father died in an accident at the sawmill where he worked. His mother, who worked as a seamstress and domestic, eventually joined the great black migration from the Deep South to Chicago.

Johnson excelled in school. The honor roll student was president of his class and editor of the school newspaper and yearbook. He was also a gifted public speaker. During a graduation speech at an Urban League dinner, he so impressed Harry Pace, president of the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Co., that he gave Johnson a job and financed a scholarship for him at the University of Chicago.

Johnson dropped out of school, but worked as editor of the insurance company’s internal magazine. He focused much of the magazine to articles printed elsewhere about blacks. It proved to be a successful formula.  Modeled after Reader’s Digest, Johnson’s Negro Digest struck a rich vein when Eleanor Roosevelt agreed to write an essay “If I were a Negro Today.” Circulation doubled almost overnight to 100,000.

Then Johnson started Ebony. It quickly surpassed Negro Digest, reaching a circulation today of nearly 2 million. 

“We wanted to give blacks a new sense of sombodiness, a new sense of self-respect,” Johnson would later tell the Washington Post about starting Ebony in 1945. “We wanted to tell them who they were and what they could do. We believed blacks needed positive images to fulfill their potentialities.”

Johnson wasn’t only concerned about positive images and the rising educated, black middle class. In 1951, Johnson started Jet, a pocket-sized weekly news magazine. In it, he covered the Civil Rights Movement, and more than anything else, his decision to publish the grotesque photograph of Emmett Till, the 15-year-old Chicago boy lynched in Mississippi in1955 for supposedly whistling at a white woman, sealed Johnson’s fate as a powerful voice against racism.

News of Johnson’s death triggered an outpouring of praise and respect. “We are not here to bury John H. Johnson,” read an editorial in the Chicago Defender, “but rather we are here to pay homage to a man who reached heights that few African Americans have ever reached.”

BET founder and chairman, Robert L. Johnson, was equally flattering. “America has lost not only the greatest African-American business leader, but one of the greatest American businessmen of all times,” Johnson said in a release. “What John H. Johnson achieved against seemingly insurmountable odds of race discrimination and economic segregation is a testament to his courage, his vision and his unparalleled entrepreneurial genius. Black America has lost a leader who gave us all a voice and a positive self-image in Ebony and Jet …”

And an edge.  “What has fascinated me,” Johnson once said, “…has been the electricity of making a deal, the challenge of managing the human elements, and the adrenaline-flowing gamble of keeping nine or ten balls in the air.”

(Compiled from wire and news reports)