As part of One Book, One Chicago, we're featuring a series of original essays titled Chicago Heroes: Real & Imagined! Each month through spring 2015, meet a local hero as introduced by a local author. Chicago authors will reflect on heroes from the past, present or even imagined in these new short essays. This month's essay is from Haki R. Madhubuti.
A leading poet and one of the architects of the Black Arts Movement, Haki R. Madhubuti—publisher, editor and educator—has been a pivotal figure in the development of a strong Black literary tradition. He has published more than 31 books (some under his former name, Don L. Lee) and is one of the world’s bestselling authors of poetry and nonfiction. He is an award-winning poet and recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, the American Book Award, an Illinois Arts Council Award, the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award and others. Professor Madhubuti is also a founder and chairman of the board of the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent, as well as the founder and publisher of Third World Press. His latest book is Honoring Genius : Gwendolyn Brooks : the Narrative of Craft, Art, Kindness and Justice : Poems.
John H. Johnson: Negotiating Breathing Space for Black Voices
By Haki R. Madhubuti
John H. Johnson, the unchallenged dean of Black publishing and entrepreneurship, was the acknowledged “first” in categories that would require hundreds of pages to list. He was the founder of Johnson Publishing Company and the publisher of Ebony, Jet, Negro Digest/Black World, Ebony Jr., EM (Ebony Man) and Ebony-South Africa, and the JPC Book Division. Johnson was the founder of Fashion Fair Cosmetics and along with his wife, Eunice, he founded the Ebony Fashion Show. He was recognized as one of the world’s first Black multi-millionaires.
When Johnson died on August 8, 2005, at the age of 87, his passing was less painful to the nation only because most of us witnessed, participated and benefited from his gigantic success. His world touched ours. We were readers of his magazines and books, listeners of his radio stations, investors in his insurance company, users of his cosmetics or viewers of his fashion shows. John H. Johnson’s ideas and entrepreneurship changed the world of Black America.
I have John H. Johnson to thank for my early recognition as a young poet. I first received national and international attention in an article written by David Llorens that appeared in the March 1969 issue of Ebony. I was the first poet-in-residence at an Ivy League university at that time, still using my birth name of Don L. Lee. Undoubtedly, my being a Black poet at Cornell University was the “hook” for Ebony. That article would help launch my career and make my third book of poetry, Don’t Cry, Scream, a national bestseller.
My first introduction to Mr. Johnson’s importance to the Black community, however, arrived in Jet magazine. His weekly publication provided us with a national view of all that was “important” in the African-American community. I grew up selling Jet magazine, not for extra money, but for living money that I contributed to our impoverished household in Detroit. Each week, I would hit the streets, barber and beauty shops, the steps of Black churches, basement taverns, buses and automobile factories and sell somewhere between 30 and 50 copies of Jet. Along with my morning and evening paper routes, shoe shine business, junk-metal collecting and my weekly Jet sales, I was making, in a good week, $15 or more, which was pretty substantial for a teenager in the 1950s.
I knew that Jet was an important must-read for most Blacks and those persons trying to keep up with the happenings in our community. I did not realize the absolute necessity of Jet, however, until the murder of Emmett Till in 1955.
Emmett Till’s body returned to Chicago locked in a wooden box with orders not to be opened. A grieving mother, whose heart had already been chopped into pieces and snatched from her body, confronted all who dared raise opposition to her seeing her son. Upon viewing his tortured, battered, bloated, mutilated, hacked and disfigured body, she realized that this crime of crimes ceased to be personal and ceased to be just about her baby. This was a national killing; and the nation should, as quickly as possible, witness the cowardly work of their Christian sons. Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie, decided that her child’s murder was not to be hidden in a closed casket with insufficient cries of racism and horror combined with pious sermons on evil and evildoers. This mother demanded that the world see what the nation did to her child. To the credit and courage of John H. Johnson, publisher of Jet Magazine, the photographs of young Emmett’s face appeared in the September 15, 1955 issue. People lined up at newsstands around the country to buy Jet and from that day on there was a new message in the nation. I heard the roar of Black people as I sold my issues of Jet. When I ran out, I quickly went to the brother who distributed them in Detroit for more, but for the first time in his memory all over the nation the magazine had sold out in less than 48 hours. Emmett Till’s execution had touched Black hearts.
African Americans now saw the end-game. White supremacy, nationalism, rage, violence and ignorance sent us its message from the hellhole of Mississippi. Now, apartheid America was public news, was state news, was national news and was world news; because Jet Magazine, for that week went against convention. The Black community nationwide put on muscle, shoes and resistance. Earth shaking was beginning, Emmett Till’s murder helped to flame a movement and a march for freedom. Mamie Till took up the memory of her son—she did not let his death become history’s forgotten page.
In Alabama, a woman named Rosa Parks was quietly readying herself to give backbone to a nation of feet. Her act of defiance hurried our introduction to a new Moses, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The United States’ history and future was about to be rewritten. Ebony and Jet magazines took the lead in informing the national and international Black community about political, cultural and economic issues. “The Jet” (as it was fondly called) and Ebony had become the national voices in and for the Black community.
Reading the Johnson publications also spoke to me as a developing poet/writer. Other than the many Black newspapers that populated the land, it was Johnson Publishing Company that helped to nurture and train the hundreds of Black journalists and photographers who emerged out of the last century. The Johnson connection is not only professional but for me, personal. His book selections and those of Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press remained the best examples for my starting Third World Press. Three of Mr. Johnson’s long-term employees served as major mentors to my own development, Lerone Bennett Jr., whose book, Before the Mayflower, was a foundational text for my early development, was a great historian, thinker and editor. Hoyt W. Fuller as editor of Johnson Publication’s Negro Digest/Black World monthly magazine took it upon himself to help develop the most important “idea” journal since the NAACP’s Crisis Magazine edited by the brilliant W.E.B. DuBois. Mr. Fuller was a mentor to hundreds of young Chicago and national writers and put precious time in developing me as an essayist. David Llorens, a friend and fellow poet/writer, was the brother who sold the idea of a story on me to Mr. Johnson.
With Jet, Ebony and Black World, we were finally able to see ourselves as Black people in a way that was not embarrassing or belittling. Mr. Johnson developed a “first class” philosophy of life. In order to be the best, we needed to see the best, and Ebony, his flagship publication, set out to prove to the world and us that we need not forever stand in lines with our hands out.
He showcased the Black emerging middle and upper classes as they were reshaping the economic landscape of the country. He writes in his autobiography, Succeeding Against the Odds, “We wanted to show Negroes—we were Negroes then—and Whites the Negroes nobody knew…. In a world of despair, we wanted to give hope. In a world of negative Black images, 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.”
For 60 years, Mr. Johnson’s dream became our dream, even when some of us had not yet learned how.
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