Magazines: Color Success Black

Negroes—particularly middle-class Negroes—often complain that the only blacks who ever get into print are athletes, performers, rioters and occasional politicians. They ask: What about the rest of us? The ones who are going to school, making it through college, getting engaged, marrying, succeeding at a job? The rather lame answer can only be that, here and there, more black faces are beginning to appear in society and business columns of a few newspapers scattered across the country. But where Negro success makes surefire copy is between the covers of Ebony magazine.

Appropriately enough, the magazine that honors success is one itself. After 22 years of publishing, Ebony has a circulation of 1,054,932, almost all of it Negro. It bulges with ads; revenue totaled $7,000,000 last year. Its publisher, John H. Johnson, puts out three other magazines as well: Jet (circ. 453,095), a pocket-size weekly of news tidbits; Tan (121,392), a monthly combination of homemaking advice and love stories; and Negro Digest (40,000), a literary monthly. Since he is also board chairman of Supreme Life Insurance Co. and owns a cosmetics company, Johnson is one of the wealthiest Negro businessmen in the U.S.

From a Negro Angle. The Johnson publications are straightforwardly of, by and for Negroes. News of the world is almost exclusively colored black. The July issue covered the funeral of Bobby Kennedy by running photos of the prominent Negroes who attended: Cleveland Mayor Carl B. Stokes, Rafer Johnson, Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr., among others. The accompanying story was a perceptive account of Bobby's growth as a civil rights leader. In a previous issue, U.S. Senators got their pictures in the magazine only because they happen to frequent the Senate restaurant presided over by a Negro maitre d'hotel, Robert Parker Jr. Said the story: "Even for Senator Richard Russell (D., Ga.), who is not noted for his high esteem for Negroes, 'there is only one maitre d' in the U.S.—Parker.' "

An earthy, plain-spoken businessman who has lived in Chicago all his adult life, Johnson, 50, is less the brilliant innovator than a shrewd judge of the Negro community. He has been careful not to get too far ahead of the times—or too far behind. He started Ebony, he said in his prospectus, "to emphasize the brighter side of Negro life and success." As the darker side has come more into view, Ebony has adjusted. Last winter, Senior Editor Lerone Bennett Jr. provoked considerable controversy and a stern rebuttal from the New York Times when he wrote an article debunking Abraham Lincoln as the "embodiment of the American racist tradition." As part of the same mood, whites have been replaced by Negroes in ads in the magazine, though some readers are upset because Ebony continues to run ads for hair straighteners and skin lighteners.