Dr. E. James West is an author, historian and scholar who specializes in researching the Black press throughout American History.
Q: What inspired you to research the history of the Johnson Publishing Company and its effort to attract a white audience?
A: My Ph.D. was about Ebony Magazine, which is one of the Johnson Publishing Company magazines. Just engaging with Ebonyprimarily as a source, and then thinking about how it works and its position within the broader ecosystem of Johnson Publishing Co., opens a lot of avenues. Johnson Publishing is one of the most important Black institutions of the twentieth century—I don’t think that’s an exaggeration to say. Ebony, as an institution, is really interesting. There are lots of different people who work there with different views. There are these quite distinct publications that are very influential, but also quite different from each other.
So, the entry point was Ebony and then just more broadly, I think Johnson Publishing Co. is an interesting institution. A lot of the work that I’ve done has focused on Johnson Publishing in different ways. It became my entry point into thinking about the Black press, and then thinking about the history of Black Chicago, which are two broader points of focus for a lot of research that I do.
Q: What surprised you the most during your research?
A: Broadly speaking, Johnson Publishing itself is quite surprising. It’s this ecosystem, and the people who work there and come in and out of the organization are just involved in so many different networks—both nationally and internationally. So, you always find really interesting connections. I just finished a book about the Black press and the built environment in Chicago, and a lot of it focused on the buildings of Johnson Publishing Co. It’s really fascinating to see the types of people who come through these buildings. You know, Martin Luther King Jr. used the Johnson headquarters as a base where he did public addresses or press conferences in the 1960s. Johnson Publishing is really just an interesting space overall.
In terms of this article specifically, I’d always seen these letters from people who were identifying themselves as white. I always thought they were quite interesting because there seems to be quite a lot of them, particularly during this early period that I focus on in the article. Then, I started thinking, “why? Can we measure this? Is it possible to quantify exactly how big this audience is?” It was quite interesting in terms of going into archives and looking for specific statistics or data of the demographics of the audience in Johnson Publishing internal reports, or reader surveys. Then, just more broadly thinking about why Johnson was invested in cultivating a white audience. Why was that beneficial to him and his publications? What did other people think about that? I did a lot of mining through Johnson’s interviews and his autobiographical materials. Trying to piece together the little bits and pieces of his words to try and paint this broader picture of the ways he tries to cultivate a white audience.
Q: In your article, you argue that Johnson aggressively sought a white audience, even though Johnson says otherwise. Why do you think Johnson strongly believed he wasn’t targeting a white audience, despite the efforts he took and the statistics that show the contrary?
A: A lot of his retreat from that rhetoric comes later on. So, I think at the time he was very intentional about it and spoke very openly about it. But then, going into the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, he starts to play down a lot of the early stuff that the company tried to do. In Johnson’s autobiography, he mentions that they always welcome white readers, but they don’t aggressively seek them out. But, if you actually look at the types of things that he did, and the types of things that the company did in the 1940s and 1950s, they show the contrary. There were elaborate public relations campaigns and explicit editorial decisions that suggest that he was intentionally and quite aggressively trying to seek out a white audience.
I outline in the article that a lot of it is strategic, and I argue that it’s linked to the desire to increase advertising revenues. It’s also linked to ideas about the relationship between advertising guarantees and circulation. So, Johnson’s gambling that if he can add, let’s say ten to fifteen percent more white readers, while still maintaining the same level of Black readers, then that would raise his overall circulation in a way that’s attractive to white corporate advertisers. That’s one aspect of it.
I do actually think that Johnson does have a genuine belief in the power and value of his magazine as a tool for interracial education. This can be observed through the type of language that gets used in the editorial content, particularly of Ebony and Negro Digest. So, it is strategic, but I also think that it’s ideological in the sense that Johnson does really believe that his magazines can have a cross-racial or interracial audience. Ultimately, they are beneficial for race relations more broadly in the country by doing so.
Q: Would you say this white audience was a staple point in Ebony’s success?
A: Because the numbers are a little bit fuzzy, I do not know specifically. But I’d definitely say the illusion of a white audience, or the idea of a white audience, was just as important as the actual reality of what that audience was like. It’s very clear that Ebonyand Negro Digest both had small yet significant percentage of white readers. In terms of whether that was five percent, ten percent, twenty percent or more, the numbers don’t exactly make a clear picture of that. However, what is very clear is that people within and outside of the Black press take this on as fact. They genuinely believe that these magazines have a white readership, and they respond to that in very specific and tangible ways.
I know there definitely were white readers and there was a decent number of them. In terms of a specific percentage, it is not clear. What is clear is the idea that this percentage of white people who are reading these magazines has a real effect, regardless of how rooted it is in actual specific data or an actual specific audience.
Q: You mentioned that some evidence may indicate that these statistics were fabricated. How do you think that played a role in Johnson’s efforts to attract the white audience?
A: Ben Burns, who himself was white, was one of the earliest and most influential editors at Johnson Publishing during its first decade. There’s some evidence, in terms of what Burns claims in his own autobiography, that some of these statistics were embellished or fabricated. It’s also mentioned that some of the specific anecdotes or interactions with white readers that are discussed in the magazines, are made up. I think there’s issues in terms of Burns’ reliability and Johnson’s reliability. Both of their memoirs intentionally try to craft a narrative about their role in the development of Johnson Publishing. There are reasons why Ben Burns and Johnson’s biographies would not be reliable sources. So, you must treat them with caution.
I think it is likely that there was a little bit of embellishment. But again, that goes back to the point that the effect is the same. Johnson is happy to play up this idea of a white audience for Ebony and Negro Digest. The overall effects are the same in the sense of cultivating the idea of a white audience, and ultimately Johnson believes that benefits him and the company.
Q: How has the Johnson Publishing Co. contributed to the racial and social justice movements during the time of its establishment, considering its goal was to become an interracial publication?
A: That’s a great question. As a historian of the Black press, I think the history of the Black press is widely overlooked. If we go back to the earliest Black journals of the early nineteenth century, the 1820’s Freedom’s Journal is recognized as the first Black newspaper and that sets a standard. This standard is the idea of viewing the Black press as a fighting press, or that it was primarily oriented around racial uplift or fighting for Black equality. This standard is maintained for some time until Johnson Publishing complicates that narrative. Johnson Publishing’s editorial approach is quite different from a lot of the earlier Black newspapers. As described in Ebony’s first issue, they focused more on the happier side of Black life. Ebony focused more on consumerism, middle class aspiration, celebrity—things of that matter.
Ebony’s approach to the idea of racial equality and what that means looks quite different from a lot of other aspects of members of the Black press. I think that’s a reason why magazines, like Ebony, have received quite short thrift by scholars. Ebony as a magazine generally isn’t taken all that seriously by historians, at least in the sense of being an outlet for racial uplift or racial politics. I think that’s fair in some regards, but I also think that when we just dismiss the political impact of the magazines that came out of Johnson Publishing, we do disservice to its broader impact as an institution. That was an impact that was very complicated, and it cut in a lot of different ways.
I think it is important to look at these Black periodicals because it complicates, expands and broadens our understanding of what the Black press did. Yes, a lot of Black periodicals were very focused on civil rights and racial injustice, and that’s obviously very important. But also, there’s this broader sphere of influence Black publications generated in terms of Black cultural life. The arts, entertainment—all of these other things that sometimes get lost in the shuffle. In terms of Johnson Publishing and where it fits that broader history of the Black press, I think that’s probably the kind of broader narrative I’m trying to spin out.
Q: In what ways did Johnson’s first newspaper, Negro Digest, set a pathway for Ebony’s rising success?
A: Well, the most obvious is that you don’t get Ebony without Negro Digest. In terms of the success of Negro Digest provided Johnson with the necessary capital to launch this more ambitious and expensive publication. The continuation of Negro Digestis really important for Ebony as well. During Ebony’s early years, before Johnson was able to attract major advertising, Ebonywas effectively running at a loss because it’s a big photo editorial magazine, so it’s very expensive to produce. In Ebony’s earliest installments, it was effectively being subsidized by the continued success of Negro Digest. From a financial perspective, that’s really important.
I also think that Negro Digest is an interesting publication because it offers a bit of a different way of thinking about the Black press, or a different approach to producing Black periodicals compared to the periodicals that come before it. A lot of earlier Black newspapers are often focused on the editorial ambitions of an individual editor or publisher. Whereas Negro Digest is by nature of its format as a digest, but also a lot more pluralistic in the way it’s put together. That diversity of material sets a tone for what comes with Ebony and Negro Digest is an interesting steppingstone to Ebony. In its later years, Negro Digest evolves a lot. It’s phased out in the early 1950s, and then revived in the early 1960s. This revival is different and became more of a Black literary journal—a Black arts journal. As a result, Negro Digest changes its name to Black World and becomes associated with the Black arts movement and it’s now known as one of the most important Black literary journals in the country.
So, the magazines aren’t static and the content changes over time. It’s important to keep that in mind. All in all, the relationship between Negro Digest and Ebony is important in the sense that you don’t get the latter without the former.
Q: How would you say Johnson’s efforts to attract a white audience aided in the Civil Rights Movement?
A: I’m not sure if it did necessarily. But I think that Johnson is tapping into this broader idea, or appeal, of racial liberalism in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s. And the publications are focused on interracial cooperation, education—things of that nature. This idea that white people can read themselves out of racism and if only you educated people on the issues of race are dominant sociological approaches that you see through works like Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City [by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton] or The Negro Problem [a 1903 edited volume of essays that included W.E.B.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington]. Johnson taps into that, and I think his magazines are a lot more palatable for white readers than something like Paul Robeson’s Freedom of the Liberator or the Chicago Defender. It offers a bit of a sanitized look at Black life or Black demands but is almost an entry point into engaging with Black life and culture.
Johnson Publishing offers a slightly more familiar entry point for white readers. There are some issues in terms of the image of Black life that people get through, particularly Ebony. Because if you’re a white reader reading Ebony, so much of it is to do with conspicuous consumption and middle-class Black success. You could read Ebony and think “Oh, actually Black people are doing really well in this country.” So, there is that issue of sugar coating the problem. But also, I do think that images matter, representation matters. Ebony presented white people an image of Black success they had never really seen before. It is a very important counter narrative to very widely disseminating images and language of racial pathology and Black pathology—like the Black underclass.
I think particularly for Ebony, we can pick a lot of holes in the magazine’s content and the way that it represents Black success. I do think that in and of itself does have some value in pushing back against the broader mainstream narrative of race and Black life in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s.
Q: What was your greatest takeaway from your research?
A: It was very useful for me in terms of my positionality. The first version of this article was a lot more focused on the white readers themselves. I was trying to think through the reasons why they read Ebony. I sent my version of that article off to a journal and I got quite negative feedback on it. The feedback was effective because they asked why I was so invested in these white readers, who may or may not exist, when the more interesting question is why Johnson himself is strategically trying to develop this audience. What are the internal processes within Johnson Publishing that are making that happen? That was useful because it was a reminder of what the value of work is and who it is for. Why was that first version more interested in the feelings or intentions of the white readers compared to what the actual strategy or expectations of the Black publisher, and the people who work for him, were? I think it’s always useful to have those reminders and it’s always important to reflect, and critically self-reflect on my own positionality, writing as a wise scholar on African American history. Also, thinking about who I am emphasizing or prioritizing in the way that I write about that history.
It’s also just a fun reminder that Johnson Publishing is a really interesting company to write about. You can go down so many little rabbit holes. I keep using this word “ecosystem” because that’s the way I think about it. It’s just this interesting cultural political ecosystem of Black life and culture. There are so many ways you can engage with the company, the individual publications or with the people who work there. I’m always looking for new ways to think about the company’s impact or to demonstrate the Johnson Publishing Co.’s impact to a wider audience.
—Interview by Zakiya Moses