Born: January 19, 1918, Arkansas City, AR

Education: Du Sable High School, graduated 1936; University of Chicago part-time, 1936–39

Died: August 8, 2005, Evanston, IL

Johnson came of age in Jim Crow Arkansas and rose to be wealthy and internationally influential.

He built a media empire. While attending college in Chicago and editing The Guardian, Supreme Life Company's organ, he started Negro Digest. “Within eight months, we were selling 50,000 copies a month nationally,” he recalled. “We never looked back.” Circulation soared to 100,000 by late 1943, thus underwriting Ebony (1945), modeled after Life magazine and courting the black middle class. He also founded Johnson Publishing Company (1949), which promoted blacks’ aspirations for an integrated society.

“The first black listed on the Forbes 400,” Johnson became eminent in publishing, beauty products, and philanthropy. In 1951 he launched Jet, intended for a mass readership, and a book publishing division. Jet's September 1955 feature story included a photo of the “horribly mangled body” of Emmett Till, age fourteen, a black Chicagoan killed in Mississippi allegedly for flirting with a white woman. The issue sold out and helped “to traumatize Black America and prepare the way for the Freedom Movement” (www.slideshare.net/kirkcody/emmett-till-case-powerpoint-8118774), which Johnson reporters followed. Moreover, Johnson's cosmetics and Ebony Fashion Fair influenced African American identity, even as his generous donations buoyed philanthropic support for corporate–community partnerships and organizations promoting affirmative action.