Jet and Ebony Magazine Founder John H. Johnson Pledged Alpha Phi Alpha in 1938

Did you know that John H. Johnson, the trailblazing publisher who founded Ebony and Jet magazines, was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.? Johnson was initiated through the fraternity’s Theta Chapter in Chicago.

John Harold Johnson was born on January 19, 1918, in Arkansas City, Arkansas, into a poor family. Because his hometown offered no high school for Black students beyond the eighth grade, his mother saved for years and moved the family to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. There, Johnson excelled at DuSable High School and went on to study at the University of Chicago while working at the Black-owned Supreme Life Insurance Company to support himself.

It was at Supreme Life that Johnson found his calling. Assigned to compile news of interest to the Black community for the company’s president, he recognized a hunger for publications that reflected Black life with dignity and pride. In 1942, unable to secure a bank loan, he launched his first magazine, Negro Digest, with a five-hundred-dollar loan borrowed against his mother’s furniture. It was an immediate success.

From that beginning, Johnson built an empire. In 1945, he founded Ebony, a glossy pictorial celebrating Black achievement and culture that quickly became the most widely read Black magazine in the country. In 1951, he added Jet, a pocket-sized weekly whose coverage of the civil rights movement made it essential reading in Black households. His Johnson Publishing Company grew into one of the most successful Black-owned businesses in American history, spanning publishing, cosmetics, and insurance.

Johnson’s success shattered ceilings. In 1982, he became the first African American to appear on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans, and in 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. John H. Johnson died on August 8, 2005, at the age of 87, leaving a legacy that reflects the Alpha Phi Alpha aims of manly deeds, scholarship, and love for all mankind.