First issue of Ebony magazine published on November 1, 1945.

John H. Johnson, who was born in poverty and who rose in one generation from the welfare rolls to the rolls of Forbes 400 richest Americans, 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 publisher virtually invented the Black Consumer Market and almost single-handedly created the foundations of the Black magazines and the Black media stars of today. Johnson was born in Arkansas City, Ark., on January 19, 1918, to Leroy Johnson and Gertrude Jenkins Johnson. His father was killed in a sawmill accident when he was 8, 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.” There was no Black high school in Arkansas City at that time, and Gertrude Johnson Williams, who was the embodiment of the strong Black mother who can’t be blocked or stopped by anything, decided to take her son to Chicago where he could get a good education. They left Arkansas City in July 1933 and were joined later by his stepfather.

Gertrude Johnson Williams and her son moved to Chicago at the height of The Great Depression and 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 finance 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 at the end of World War II in his “lucky month” of November. The first issue of Ebony sold 25,000 copies, making it the largest circulated Black-owned magazine. Sixty years later, the magazine has a circulation of 1,600,000 and is still the largest circulated Black-owned magazine in the world.

There had been Black magazines before, but none had attracted enough advertising to make them commercially viable. Johnson solved that problem by telling advertisers that it was in their self-interest to use Black models to appeal directly to Black consumers, who constituted, he said, a bigger consumer market than foreign countries like Canada and Australia. In November 1951, Johnson started Jet, which became the No. 1 Black newsweekly and sparked the saying in Black America: “If it wasn’t in Jet, it didn’t happen.” He also published books, bought radio stations, and produced TV shows. Another coup for the company was Ebony Fashion Fair, the world’s largest traveling fashion show, which is produced and directed by Eunice Walker Johnson. Since 1958, it has raised more than $51 million for the UNCF and other community scholarship groups and has made it possible for hundreds of students to attend college.

In 1973, the entrepreneur created a cosmetics division, Fashion Fair Cosmetics, to meet the need for a complete line of high-quality beauty products for a wide variety of skin tones. Fashion Fair Cosmetics, is sold in over 2,500 upscale stores in America, Africa, Europe, Canada and the Caribbean. During this period and later, Johnson became one of the pioneer Black directors of major American corporations, serving on the boards of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, The Dial Corporation, Chrysler, Zenith, Conrail, Bell & Howell, Continental Bank, Dillard Department Stores and other corporations. He also became chairman of the board of Supreme Life Insurance Company, where he started his career as an office boy. He served as a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, the United Negro College Fund, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews and was on the Advisory Board of the Harvard Business School.

The publisher advised civil rights leaders and presidents. He accompanied Vice President Richard Nixon on a goodwill tour of Africa and served as a Special United States Ambassador for both President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He was a personal friend and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, and Ebony, Jet, and Black World, played key roles in the Freedom Movement and were pioneers in popularizing African-American history and 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 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, [is] 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 the first black person to appear on the Forbes 400 Rich List, and had a fortune estimated at close to $500 million.Johnson was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. John Johnson died of heart failure on August 8, 2005 at the age of 87 in Chicago at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He is survived by his widow, Eunice, and his daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, who now runs the Johnson Publishing empire.