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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.

This chapter focuses on the publication of Ebony’s first major “Negro History” series during the early 1960s, a feature which helped to formalise its role as an outlet for popular black history and signalled the emergence of Lerone Bennett, Jr. as a popular historian and public intellectual. The diverse ways in which Ebony’s audience and external critics engaged with the magazine’s series reveals the importance of Ebony’s role as a ‘history book’, but also how this role was contested by other black history outlets and organisations

This chapter documents how Bennett specifically, and Ebony more broadly, began to use black history as a lens through which to critique the gains and trajectory of the civil rights movement and the emergence of Black Power on the national stage. It focuses on the publication of Bennett’s “Black Power” series, which both preceded and overlapped with the popularisation of the Black Power slogan by activists such as Stokely Carmichael, and which aimed to analyse new patterns of black radical activist through a historical framework.

This chapter situates Ebony’s evolving black history content within the broader struggle for black-centred education and the ‘Black Revolution’ on campus during the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, Ebony’s historical content presented a militant and, at times, heavily gendered interpretation of the African American past. On an individual level, Bennett’s developing relationship with organisations such as Northwestern University and the Institute of the Black World underscored the uniqueness of his role as Ebony’s in-house historian, and the complexity of his position as both a magazine editor and a black public intellectual.

This chapter charts Ebony’s initial response to the ‘mainstreaming’ of black history in American popular and political culture during the 1970s, focused around the magazine’s discussion of, and engagement with, the American Bicentennial in 1976. As a whole, Ebony’s coverage of the Bicentennial reflected a shift away from a more activist-oriented depiction of black history and an embrace of less political and more commemorative editorial perspective. Yet even as this shift occurred, Bennett pushed for a rejection of the Bicentennial as an ‘affront to truth and freedom.’

This chapter explores how internal and external tensions influencing Ebony’s depiction of black history fed into the struggle to establish a national holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the 1970s and 1980s. Against this backdrop, Bennett and other Ebony contributors struggled to negotiate the continued importance of the magazine’s black history content in a changing cultural and political climate. For some, the King Holiday represented an opportunity to reflect on the activist’s legacy as a ‘hero to be remembered.’ For others, it was a chance to reiterate the political application of the black past and its role in the ongoing struggle for black liberation.

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.

Chapter 2 discusses the history of homeownership as a component of U.S. nationalism and white identity and how government policies led to the creation of a new, racialized market for home goods. Paying specific attention to the impact exclusionary policies had on perceptions of Black consumerism and belonging, this chapter examines the marketing that was aimed at Black urban inhabitants through magazines like Ebony. As the flagship Black magazine of the mid-twentieth century, Ebony reflects the way Black consumerism was cultivated in connection to the streets, often in derogatory ways.

Chapter 6 revolves around the cultural impact of African American novelist Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family in the late-twentieth century. It specifically examines how the novel and miniseries built upon a pre-existing interest among Black Americans seeking to reconnect with their cultural heritage, though the widescale impact of Haley’s work produced a much more robust examination of slavery’s role in US history among readers and viewers of Roots, and it introduced a method through which descendants of the enslaved might approach that era of history. Ultimately, it argues that Roots’ widespread popularity secured its position in the popular culture of Black Americans and revived a number of discarded customs, including the broomstick wedding. This marital tradition was even highlighted in a controversial plagiarism case made against Haley by the novelist Margaret Walker, whose book Jubilee had also referenced the tradition a decade before. However, alongside Roots immense popularity, popular magazines like Ebony and Jet helped institute a rise in Afrocentric marital practices by the 1980s, and “jumping the broom” started to gain many different meanings and associations as it acquired a larger number of practitioners as Americans entered the 1990s.

Dr. Hopkins is one of the few American women to have held a doctorate in science and a license to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Her career included academia, industry, and government. Esther was born Esther Arvilla Harrison on September 16, 1926, in Stamford, Connecticut. She was the second of three children born to George Burgess Harrison and Esther Small Harrison. Her father was a chauffeur and sexton at a church, and her mother worked in domestic service. Neither of her parents had an advanced education. Her father had some high school education; her mother attended only primary school. However, both of her parents wanted to make sure their children had a good education. When Esther was three and a half years old, her mother took her along to register her older brother for school. Because Esther was taller than her brother, the teacher suggested that she take the test to start school. She passed the test and was able to start kindergarten at the age of three and a half! She and her brother went to school together all through elementary school. Boys and girls were separated in junior high school; in high school they remained separate but attended the same school. She decided in junior high school that she wanted to be a brain surgeon. This was because she met a woman doctor in Stamford who had an office in one of the buildings that her father cleaned. The woman was a physician and graduate of Boston University Medical School. Esther decided that she wanted to be just like her. Therefore, when Esther entered high school, she chose the college preparatory math and science track. She took as many science courses as possible in order to get into Boston University. She spent a lot of time at the local YWCA, becoming a volunteer youth leader. One speaker at a YWCA luncheon discouraged her from entering science and suggested that she become a hairdresser. Esther was hurt but not discouraged by this. She graduated from Stamford High School in 1943.