In a funeral befitting a fallen head of state, visiting dignitaries and average Chicagoans on Monday remembered businessman John H. Johnson, crediting the publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines with changing how blacks are seen in the United States.
The Johnson Publishing Company and Fashion Fair Cosmetics magnate’s dark wooden casket rested at the front of the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, framed and enshrouded with displays of brilliant red roses.
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Seated around him was a former president, the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois, past and present members of Congress, and a five-person delegation from the West African nation of Ghana.
More than a thousand people crowded the stone chapel, with hundreds more outside signing guest books in the shade of trees along the Midway Plaisance. Old women and children reclined in chairs listening to the service on speakers.
The ceremony was simple but lasted nearly three hours. Inspirational messages abounded as one speaker after another remembered Johnson, his magazines, his cosmetics line and his dream to uplift black Americans.
Among them was former President Bill Clinton, who helped Johnson’s widow, Eunice, to her seat. He spoke of Johnson’s beginnings in Arkansas and his place among the millions who left the South for better opportunities in northern cities such as Chicago during the Great Migration in the 1920s and `30s.
“Out of this swarm of hardworking, family-loving men and women carving out their own version of the American dream, one man stood out because his dream was bigger and he had a vision for how to achieve it,” Clinton said.
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) called Johnson a force that left “an imprint on the conscience of a nation.”
The series of eulogies that followed–15 in all–stretched for hours.
Johnson, 87, of Chicago, died of heart failure Aug. 8 in Northwestern Memorial Hospital downtown. Besides his wife, survivors include his daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, head of Johnson Publishing since 2002, and a granddaughter, Alexa Rice, who thanked well-wishers on behalf of the family Monday.
Emotional tributes
In the chapel behind Johnson’s casket sat the silver-robed members of the Sanctuary Choir of the Apostolic Church of God, whose songs carried mourners through grief and then filled the chapel with uplifting crescendos.
A single theme wove through the service: At a time when America viewed blacks in negative stereotypes, Johnson forced the country to see them as achievers.
“His business philosophy was `Don’t join them. Beat them.’ And he did,” Mayor Richard Daley said.
The speakers recalled the remarkable story of Johnson’s life and career.
Johnson, born in Arkansas City, Ark., in 1918, moved with and his widowed mother to Chicago in 1933. He worked part time at the black-owned Supreme Life Insurance Co.
There, he culled newspapers and magazines for a digest of events in the black community for the company’s president. But by 1942, he had the idea to condense such articles into a monthly magazine called Negro Digest–later Black World.
His mother borrowed $500 against her furniture, and Johnson used the money to mail an offer for the magazine to Supreme Life customers. Some 3,000 people responded, each sending $2.
“I wonder where that furniture is now,” Clinton joked during the service. “If he had it, it’d be worth more than all the furniture in the White House and Buckingham Palace put together.”
Within a year, Negro Digest sold 50,000 copies a month. Johnson followed it by introducing Ebony in 1945, which he modeled after Life magazine, and then Jet, a newsweekly founded in 1951. On their strength, Johnson Publishing became one of America’s largest black-owned businesses, with annual revenues around $500 million.
But besides business success, the magazines touched on something Johnson knew to be hidden within the psyche of black Americans at the time: A sense of self-worth.
“Today, we recognize the simple truth that John Johnson was a part of all of us,” Obama said. Monday’s service showed how far Johnson’s influence had reached.
Host of luminaries
Former U.S. senator and ambassador Carol Moseley Braun shared the chapel with boxing promoter Don King.
Clinton sat next to longtime Ebony executive editor Lerone Bennett Jr., Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Obama and Mayor Daley beside the casket. Across from them, U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. sat between Rev. Al Sharpton and Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan.
Movie and TV producer Suzanne de Passe was there, as was actress-singer Diahann Carroll, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Time Warner chairman Richard Parsons and civic leaders John Bryan and William Daley, the brother of the mayor. Comedian-civil rights activist Dick Gregory attended, as did Motown records founder Berry Gordy Jr.
Blagojevich, the first to speak Monday, called Johnson’s life story an “epic” that was “more than the American dream.” He decreed the date “John Johnson Day” in Illinois.
Black Enterprise publisher Earl G. Graves Sr. talked of how Johnson had gone from rival to friend in a single meeting. John W. Teets, the former chairman of Dial Corp., also called Johnson his “best friend.”
Playboy CEO Christie Hefner, the daughter of magazine founder Hugh Hefner, delivered a tribute, as did Peoples Gas president and longtime family friend Desiree Rogers, who revealed both that Johnson enjoyed bubble-gum flavored ice cream and knew something of hair coloring products “for men of a certain age.”
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When broadcasters Tom Joyner and Tavis Smiley spoke, Smiley compared Johnson to such African-Americans as Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks.
Johnson linked all of them, said H. Patrick Swygert, president of Howard University.
“He cataloged our achievements. He encouraged us to do more,” Swygert said. “He inspired us to tell the true story of our history–of our potential–to young people.”
`He was a pathfinder’
Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. delivered the service’s benediction.
“He put a human face on African people. He changed the face of American journalism,” Jackson said. “The media projected us as less intelligent than we were, less hardworking, less patriotic, more volatile, less worthy. But John Johnson affirmed us with a clear mirror and clear water. We were not ugly, the water was dirty, and the dirty mirror gave distorted images of who we really were.”
Leading the service was Rev. William H. Gray III, a senior minister at Bright Hope Baptist Church in Philadelphia, also a former majority whip in Congress and former president of the United Negro College Fund.
“He was a pathfinder,” Gray said in his eulogy. “He ventured forth blazing new trails and opportunities for all of us.”
Before Johnson’s rose-covered casket was taken from the chapel–an orchestra playing the Duke Ellington classic “Take the `A’ Train” in the background–Gray summed up Johnson’s achievements, framed Monday by a sense of loss.
“Someone special, someone majestic, has left us,” he said.
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