Passed On: John H. Johnson

When I was a little bitty girl, Ebony and Jet came to our house. Those, along with Life, were the first magazines I saw. I would ooo and ahhh over the pretty black ladies in their fine fashions; Mamma would read aloud to me about the "People In The News" and ooo and ahh over the wedding announcements. She would keep her "Date With A Dish," and boy, was that good eating!

When I was a little older, Mamma would buy tickets to the Ebony Fashion Fair, and we would go to whatever church hosted the event that year. I remember when it was held at Trinity University, in Laurie Auditorium ... little did I dream I would graduate from Trinity years later, and sit in that very same auditorium, waiting to get my sheepskin and get on with my life ...!

In reading John Johnson's obituary, I note that he was "born into an impoverished family in Arkansas" in 1918. The article goes on: "Johnson went into business with a $500 loan secured by his mother's furniture and built a publishing and cosmetics empire."


Hmmm ... Jim Crow didn't get him down. No White man stood in his way.

[Johnson] sent an ad salesman to Detroit every week for 10 years before an auto manufacturer agreed to advertise in Ebony.

And, in this most excellent example of "fake it till you make it":

To persuade a distributor to take the magazine [Negro Digest, an early magazine from Johnson Publishing], he got co-workers to ask for it at newsstands on Chicago's South Side. Friends bought most of the copies, convincing dealers the magazine was in demand, while Johnson reimbursed the friends and resold the copies they had bought. The tactic was used in New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, and within a year, Negro Digest was selling 50,000 copies a month.

A while ago, a white genealogist and I discussed how tough life was in the 18th and 19th centuries. She and I both realized we were way too soft to have survived back then. Our forefathers and foremothers had to work so had for the bare necessities of life: the need to haul every drop of water from the creek or well to the house, the dawn-to-dusk struggle and toil required to grow one's own food, the joint-popping labor required to process raw cotton or wool into rudimentary clothing. She said she considered these people, our forebears, to have been made of pure steel. And, she continued to me, "if I found that I had black ancestors in my family tree, I would be even more proud of them, because if the white ones were steel, the black ones must have been blue twisted steel."

The man above was, indeed, blue twisted steel.

Fair journey.

Update #1

Some quotes from Mr. Johnson:

Men and women are limited not by the place of their birth, not by the color of their skin, but by the size of their hope.

When I see a barrier, I cry, I curse, and then I get a ladder and climb over it. [emphasis mine.]

Failure is a word I don’t accept.

Every day I run scared. That's the only way I can stay ahead.

My mother was the influence in my life. She was strong; she had great faith in the ultimate triumph of justice and hard work. She believed passionately in education.

When I go in to see people - and I sell an occasional ad now - I never say, 'Help me because I am black' or 'Help me because I am a minority.' I always talk about what we can do for them.