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“Ebony Magazine” is the longest-running of the several successful magazines of Johnson Publications, the Chicago Negro publishing house. Recently, a special issue of Ebony was release to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. There were articles about Negro-American history, Negro press, Negro women, the future of civil-rights leadership, Negroes in entertainment, Negroes in painting, and Negroes in business. But ironically, jazz music was not given much attention in this issue. Jazz is a reality of Negro life in America, and something that all Americans should be proud of.

During the Cold War, the anticommunism movement spurred leading black publishers to rid their newsrooms of left-leaning journalists and suppress coverage of radical political perspectives. Publishers made a pragmatic decision to protect their businesses. This action reoriented black newswriting by narrowing the parameters of what was considered acceptable political discourse just as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum. Commercial journalists transformed into establishmentarian dissidents who denounced communism and worked within the prevailing political structure for social change. Frustrated and marginalized, progressive editors and activists revived a struggling alternative black press – with Paul Robeson’s Freedom being the most notable publication – to challenge the politcs of integration. Meanwhile, national newspapers’ circulations collapsed as they encountered new competitive challenges from white newspapers, television, and Ebony and Jet magazines.

This chapter contextualizes King’s fist known sermon on dreams against the popular success of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. Because this play took its title from a line in Hughes’s poem “Dream Deferred,” the discussion reveals that King’s first extended engagement with the metaphor of the dream resulted in a consideration of “shattered dreams” that specifically parallels another image in Hughes’s poem. News coverage in the New York Times, a paper King himself read on a regular basis, is carefully researched and presented to establish the cultural context between King’s speech, Hansberry’s play, and Hughes’s poem. King’s sermon “Unfulfilled Hopes” takes some of its context from the sermons and writings of Frederick Meek and Howard Thurman. However, despite apparent connections to the ideas of J. Wallace Hamilton, tracing King’s own reading habits in regards to poetry suggests that Hughes’s poem is the clearest point of reference for King and his parishioners. To create the context of both Hughes’s popularity and this play’s remarkable success, the chapter concludes with an examination of advertisements in Ebony that featured Hughes himself selling Smirnoff Vodka.

John H. Johnson was a titan of 20^th century business. Starting from humble beginnings, Johnson created two of the most successful magazines in American history (Ebony and Jet) and built a personal fortune made him one of the richest people in America. Yet the strategic decisions Johnson made that led to his successes is much less recognized. This chapter examines how Johnson made key strategic decisions and choices that enabled him to build the Johnson Publishing Company into a major media force. Additionally, it analyzes the choices Johnson made as he grappled with critics of his publishing tactics, other black publishers whose businesses competed with his own, and distributors who refused to carry his products regardless of the financial benefit to them for doing so.

In the last years of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, blacks saw their voting strength continue to increase. While registrars in the South continued to block Negro registration, the Negro vote in the North became a key factor for the Democratic Party in the 1958 mid-term elections. In the presidential elections, both Democrats and Republicans tried to woo the growing black vote. This was evident in Baltimore, hometown of the NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell and journalist Carl Murphy, and believed to be where the modern civil rights movement actually began. In 1959, the city achieved a “sudden, spectacular spurt” in voter registration that had accelerated the pace of desegregation in education, employment, and housing. In its annual retrospective, the monthly magazine Ebony reflected on black progress in 1959, while its sister publication Jet noted the election of blacks in a number of Northern cities to state and local offices in record numbers.

The 1960 election year marked Ebony’s fifteenth anniversary issue. The magazine had grown to 172 pages, printed more than 800,000 copies, and read by about four million people in some 30 countries such as France, Germany, and Japan. In this chapter, the author reflects on his coverage of the 1960 presidential election that pitted Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy and in which blacks and civil rights figured prominently.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy sparked feelings of apprehension and uncertainty about the future of civil rights in black America. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, was weak in the area of civil rights. Two days after JFK’s death, Johnson began talking to civil rights leaders, including National Urban League executive director Whitney Young, to win their support for the passage of the late president’s civil rights bill. Like JFK before him, Johnson was aware of the growing influence of the black press, which explained his decision to invite John H. Johnson, publisher of Jet and Ebony, to the White House. This chapter focuses on Johnson’s campaign to have the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed in Congress and his alleged dalliance with his black secretary Geraldine Whittington.

This chapter offers empirical insights into the racial discourse on diversity, the creation of national and personal identities, and the perception of minorities in Germany and the United States by looking at the two countries’ racial history. It focuses on Hans Jürgen Massaquoi’s triple identity as a mixed-race person of African and German heritage born in Hamburg to a German mother and African father in the Weimar era and later naturalized as an American citizen. While managing editor of Ebony, the most influential African American magazine in the United States, Massaquoi published a series of articles on Afro-Germans. The chapter examines his autobiographical writings and compares the attitudes of Americans and Germans toward blacks, mixed-race people, and racial assimilation. It also considers Massaquoi’s journey of personal transformation and how he became witness to the national transformation brought about in America by the civil rights movement.

In this chapter, the author talks about his family background and professional life as a journalist. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, although he grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. His father, Simeon S. Booker, was General Secretary of the Colored Branch of the Baltimore YMCA while his mother, Reberta Waring Booker, belonged to a generation of nationally-known educators. His maternal grandfather, Dr. James Henry Nelson Waring, a medical doctor and a renowned educator, was involved in YMCA work during World War I. The author reflects on his time at Virginia Union University, his first experience in the South and his first adult view of real segregation; his successful application for the Nieman Fellowship; his stint at the Washington Post; and his joining the black-owned magazines Ebony and Jet.

This chapter historicizes and theorizes the sexual and commodity fetishization of the black female body/booty in multiple historical and contemporary “scientific,” economic, and cultural venues and markets, including American slavery, European colonialism, modernist primitivism, and hip-hop video culture. Focusing on the “(mis)performance” of the “video vixen,” whose presence in popular culture has undoubtedly served to (re)define black female bodies in the contemporary cultural imaginary, the chapter compares the performance of the “video hottie” with that of her forebears, Saartjie Baartmann (the “Venus Hottentot”) and Josephine Baker (the “Ebony Venus”), examining the staging of the black female body as spectacle, commodity, and fetish on the antebellum auction block, as ethnographic spectacle in nineteenth-century Europe, and as model/dancer in contemporary hip-hop musical video. It concludes by issuing a call to contemporary black feminist scholars to bear critical witness to the video vixen’s “performance of testimony” to the history imprinted on the black female body.