Rebrand

Ebony debuted in November 1945, the brainchild of John H. Johnson, a businessman in Chicago. As he put it, “Ebony was founded to provide positive images for Blacks in a world of negative images and non-images.” The first issue totaled twenty-five thousand copies. Its audience grew steadily; Ebony was one of a kind in producing elite journalism by and for Black people. “Johnson provided prominent writers with an almost unlimited budget to travel,” James West, a historian at University College London and codirector of the Black Press Research Collective, told me. “They could go to places that no other Black journalists could go to on a consistent basis. They had the budget to fly to the Caribbean to do an interview with Amy Jacques Garvey,” a pioneering Jamaican journalist. “They could fly to Africa, or they could fly to London to do a story on mixed-race children.” Ebony’s photojournalism was iconic: images featured stars of African American history—Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Shirley Chisholm—and included intimate portraits—Thurgood Marshall after the birth of his son, Maya Angelou scribbling in her journal in bed. In tandem with Jet—founded by Johnson in 1951 as “The Weekly Negro News Magazine”—Ebony chronicled the civil rights movement. For a 1965 special issue, Lerone Bennett Jr., a scholar and longtime Ebony executive editor, wrote, “There is no Negro problem in America. The problem of race in America, insofar as that problem is related to packets of melanin in men’s skins, is a white problem.” Bill Garland, of the Black Panthers; David Llorens, Ebony’s associate editor and director of Black studies at the University of Washington; and Charles L. Sanders, the magazine’s managing editor, delivered radical provocations on race. And yet, West told me, “throughout this whole period, Ebony is still, at its heart, a quite consumerist, bougie publication.” At one point, Johnson told the New York Times that the magazine’s mission “was not to constantly remind Blacks of racial discrimination but rather ‘to tell them how to overcome it, how to get around it, or, if necessary, how to buy the establishment that refused them.’”