Gertrude Williams already knew her son was smart. When he was three she had taught him the alphabet, and he could read before he entered the first grade. At Chicago’s black DuSable High School, still pushed and encouraged by the relentless Gertrude, young John was an honor student. He became president of his class, then president of the student council, editor of the school newspaper, and editor of the senior class yearbook. (For many years, since he never graduated from college—though he has received a number of honorary degrees—John Johnson listed these achievements in his paragraph in Who’s Who.) At John Johnson’s high school commencement, the speaker was one Earl B. Dickerson, an executive of the Supreme Life Insurance Company of America, one of the largest black-owned insurance companies in the country. Dickerson was impressed with the young student body president, and hired him as an office boy for $6 a week. That was in 1936, when jobs of any sort, for young men of any color, were not easy to get.
Part of Johnson’s job at Supreme Life was to comb through magazines and newspapers for black news items, and to compile a summary of these for the company president. He was also, as a result of his high school newspaper experience, placed in charge of putting out the company house organ. As he collected news items on blacks, he noticed a significant fact. Whenever a black made an important achievement, or outdid a white man, that made news. Similarly, it was news whenever a black man committed a crime. But no national publication devoted itself to the day-to-day existences, and problems, of normal black people who led routine, unheralded lives. He discussed this with friends, who agreed that there appeared to be a need for a black news digest. Moonlighting after hours at Supreme Life, and quietly “borrowing” the use of the company’s printing equipment, Johnson began putting together a dummy issue of the kind of publication he had in mind. To seek subscribers, he decided he would have to send out direct-mail fliers, but that would require money. It is still not easy for a black to borrow money, and it was much harder in 1942. After several unfruitful visits to loan companies, he went to his mother.
“I didn’t have any money,” Gertrude Williams says, “but I said, ‘I’ll pray on it.’” Typically, her husband was unwilling to help. “He just wasn’t interested,” she says. “I told John the only thing I owned was my furniture.” Would she be willing to sell some of her furniture? “I’ll have to pray on that,” she told him. A week or so later, he came to her again. He had learned of a man who would loan him the money if the furniture were put up as collateral. Again, she said she would first have to pray. When he came to her a third time, she agreed to let the man come to appraise her furniture. He came, and told her that $500 was the most money he could offer her, and, with that, every bit of property Gertrude Williams owned was mortgaged.
The $500 worth of advertising fliers, however, quickly yielded $6,000 worth of subscription orders. John Johnson’s monthly Negro Digest, as he called it, was on its way, and the Johnson Publishing Company was born. Still, in the first months, the sledding was not always easy. At one point, $100 was desperately needed and John Johnson and his mother went to a well-to-do black friend and asked to borrow the money. They were refused, and so Gertrude Williams went to her white employer, who loaned her the money. “She trusted me, she knew I was reliable.” (Later on, when the same black friend saw that Johnson Publishing was beginning to be successful, “He tried to get on the bandwagon,” Gertrude Williams says, “and I told him, ‘You wouldn’t give us money when we needed it. Now we don’t need your money.’”) Today, the Johnson Publishing Company, conservatively estimated to be worth between $50,000,000 and $60,000,000, is solely owned by John Johnson, his mother, and his wife, Eunice. When John Johnson’s stepfather also tried to get on the bandwagon, he was given a job as a building superintendent.
Gertrude Williams does not speak in the polished, cultivated accents of a Charlotte Hawkins Brown. In fact, she considers emphasis on such matters sheer frippery. “I’m the same woman I always was,” she says. “Folks used to say to me, ‘Miz Gert, what you got on your mind? I said, just one thing—that little boy.’ It’s the same today. My duties now are to see over everything. I fill his place when he’s away. I can sign any check he can sign. I’m there whenever he’s honored. I got so many plaques and awards I can’t count ’em! It’s because I believed the Lord was going to bring us out. Nobody gets between my son and me, not even his wife. If it’s a question of her or me, it’s me he listens to. I’m his mother, and I’m his best friend, because he always trusted me to be a Christian and a mother. I taught him to wait and pray, and he saw how I suffered and how I sacrificed to bring him on up. During the early days, he worked, and I worked. I took in sewing night and day. I helped him buy an old second-handed car when he needed it, and he worked nights with a chauffeur service for college students. Now I spend Christmas and New Year’s in Palm Springs, California. I’ve been to Hawaii, Mexico, and Canada, but I haven’t changed. I still help everybody—we have to help each other—and if I’m not at Emanuel Baptist Church every Sunday morning, a dozen people call to ask me where I’m at. I’ve got some nieces and nephews and cousins in the South—they write and ask for help, and I help them. I send them something every Christmas, and I don’t just send stuff. I send money. And I send money to friends, too, that needs help. I say, ‘The Lord knew what he was doing when he didn’t give me more children, just my son. It was the Lord that brought us both over.’ I’ve got nothing against anybody, I’ve got love in my heart, and my love of my son is like my love of the Lord. A girl friend once asked me, ‘Miz Gert, would you take money for him?’ I just laughed and said, ‘Honey, there isn’t that much money in the whole wide world!’”
3
Apartment Hunting
The tall buildings of steel and stone and glass that line Chicago’s North Lake Shore Drive array themselves in a wide arc along the shore of Lake Michigan, a glittering symbol of the city’s wealth and power. These proud apartment houses, curving northward in a seemingly endless procession of canopied entrances and uniformed doormen, address the morning sun and the shimmer of the lake in an attitude of limitless self-satisfaction. The buildings are, of course, a magnificent facade, a screen that hides a somewhat different situation because just a few short blocks to the west of Lake Shore Drive the city shrugs its shoulders and collapses into an appalling slum of cheap rooming houses and dingy bars, weed-filled vacant lots and cracked sidewalks where it is dangerous to walk at night, an area that has become predominantly black. Still, North Lake Shore Drive—the “Gold Coast,” as it is called—remains Chicago’s most prestigious address. Here, in vast floor-through apartments and a few remaining private city mansions, live Chicago’s rich.
Along Lake Shore Drive are not only the homes of Chicago’s Old Guard—Swifts, McCormicks, Wrigleys, Swearingens, Seeburgs, Paepckes, and Palmers—but also the new-rich arrivistes. Anyone who has prospered mightily in the city is expected to move to Lake Shore. Still, there was more than the usual stir caused in 1970 when Mr. and Mrs. John H. Johnson moved into not one, but two, huge apartments at the Carlyle, at 1040 North Lake Shore, one of the most opulent buildings on that opulent street. It was not just that Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were black, but the alleged means by which the Johnsons got their double apartment was the talk of the town.
The Johnsons, so the story went, wanted to buy an apartment on the Carlyle’s twenty-fourth floor. But a neighbor in an adjoining apartment objected. And so John Johnson, who is known in the rich black community affectionately as “The Godfather,” made the neighbor an offer he couldn’t refuse—and asked the neighbor to name his price for the apartment. The neighbor named the price, Johnson wrote out a check, and bought the second apartment The Johnsons knocked down walls, threw the two dwellings together, and created what is now considered to be one of the largest—and is certainly one of the most spectacular—apartments in town.
What actually happened was something a little different. The Johnsons had already owned, for several years previous to their dr
amatic move, an apartment on the eighteenth floor of the Carlyle. But they had been looking for a larger place—higher up, with a better view. And Eunice Johnson, a stylish, bubbly, throaty-voiced woman, had been toying with the idea of putting two apartments together. When an apartment on the twenty-fourth floor became available, the only problem was to persuade the owner of the second apartment on the floor to sell. Prejudice was not the issue, and the woman who owned the second apartment had no objection to living next door to blacks. But she had just redecorated her apartment, and was reluctant to give it up. John and Eunice Johnson not only made her a handsome offer for her place, but also sweetened it with $15,000 extra for the woman to redecorate the Johnsons’ old apartment on the eighteenth floor. And so the trade was amicably arranged. “She was very nice about it,” Eunice Johnson says. “When she finished her redecorating on the eighteenth floor, she wrote me a note saying that she hadn’t spent the entire fifteen thousand, and enclosed a check for me for six hundred dollars’ change.”
And so the Johnsons have their double apartment. They turned decorators Arthur Elrod and William Raiser loose on the place, and, some $250,000 later, the apartment was all done in colors of honey, beige, gold, caramel, and earth brown. “We wanted colors that would match our skin tones,” says Eunice Johnson, a fashion-conscious lady who is also a talented interior designer. The walls of the huge double living room are composed of unfinished strips of barn siding, alternating with panels of beige marble. A large coffee table is made of alternating strips of zebrawood and mahogany, with strips of burnished brass at the edges. The thick woven-to-size rug is of custard-colored beige, and the floors are of petrified wood. A room that serves as an office-den has walls covered with leather. Opening off the long central foyer are two marbled and gold-fitted powder rooms, one for ladies and one for gentlemen. Both Eunice and John Johnson have private bed-sitting room suites in the apartment, as do their children, John, Jr., and Linda, and their bathrooms are equipped with bidets and sunken Jacuzzi whirlpool baths. Beds operate electrically, and closet and dressing room doors swing out to reveal countless built-in compartments with Lucite trays for gloves, hose, lingerie, purses, an entire closet for shoes, another for dresses, another for furs. Library walls are covered with real leather, and closet walls are upholstered with imitation fur. Most spectacular, perhaps, is the Johnson kitchen, which, again, is a double affair, with two complete cooking-serving areas, four refrigerator-freezers, two stoves, an electronic oven, a charcoal pit for barbecuing, six sinks, a double pantry, three dishwashers. Though the Johnsons employ a cook and butler, Eunice Johnson is not above going into her kitchen to whip up a pound cake for a special guest. She loves to show off her apartment, pointing to a large Picasso that dominates the dining room, to the two fully plumbed bars, to sliding room dividers that disappear into walls. At Eunice Johnson’s dinner table, glasses are of the heaviest crystal, tableware is of the heaviest silver, the coffee cups are of the thinnest Limoges, and the napkins are of the heaviest damask. And yet, for all the luxury that surrounds her, Eunice Johnson is able to view her circumstances with a certain humor. Showing a photograph of herself chatting with Marc Chagall, she says, “When I first met him at the White House—” and then breaks off with a laugh. “Listen to me,” she says. “Listen to me saying, ‘When I met him at the White House’!”
Eunice Walker Johnson, whom John Johnson married in 1941, is also from a small town in Arkansas, but comes from a very different sort of background. Along with her considerably lighter skin, straight hair, and what blacks call “nice white looks,” she is also of good family. Though she did not attend Palmer, she is very much the “Palmer type.” She graduated from fashionable Talladega College and, in fact, her maternal grandfather, William H. McAlpine, founded Talladega, which was originally established as a school for Baptist ministers. Grandpa McAlpine was a close friend of Booker T. Washington’s. At Talladega, Eunice Walker was properly a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha and, after college, she went on to get a master’s degree at Loyola University. Her father’s father was a property owner in Alabama and, though far from rich, the Walkers had been comfortably off for some time, and were a far cry from the abject poverty in which John Johnson grew up. Eunice’s father was a physician, and her mother was principal of the local high school. Two of her brothers are also medical doctors, and her sister is a Ph.D. For John Johnson, marrying Eunice was a distinct move upward in the black social scale, and for Eunice, her marriage to John Johnson was also considered a “catch,” since by 1941 he was already a young man whose star was visibly on the rise.
John Johnson also gives his mother full credit for his share in his success. “She pushed me all the way,” he says. “For a long time, I never even knew that fathers were necessary. We were poor, we were sharecroppers, and there was never enough money to pay the boss man, but it was a wonderful, happy childhood.” He is more casual about attributing success to prayer and the Lord, however, and thinks that his own inventiveness as a salesman was a major factor. In the beginning, there was resistance on the part of distributors and news dealers against placing Negro Digest on newsstands. It wouldn’t sell, they claimed, and “Negroes don’t buy magazines.” To overcome this attitude, Johnson got on the telephone and spent days telephoning news dealers, in variously disguised voices, and asking, “Do you have the new issue of Negro Digest? You don’t? Can you tell me where I can find it?” The little ploy worked, and dealers began placing orders. And the magazine did sell. Today, renamed Black World, and devoted largely to black literary matters, the magazine has a monthly circulation of over 50,000. “I’m often asked when Negro Digest first became successful,” Johnson says, “and I say that it was with the first issue. It had to be, or there’d never have been a second issue.”
Three years later, he was ready for a much more ambitious undertaking—a big, slick-paper picture magazine to be called Ebony, which was to be in size, appearance, and format an unabashed imitation of Life, which was then the giant of white American weeklies. When he was accused of trying to ape the white man’s Life, Johnson shrugged off the criticism, saying that this was precisely his intention—just as Newsweek, in the beginning, had imitated Time. Ebony was to be the Life for black people, and the chief difference between the two magazines would be that the faces in the photographs in Ebony would be for the most part black. The first issue of Ebony, with a press run of 25,000 copies, appeared in 1945.
Ebony was an immediate success with readers. But, within a year of its appearance, the magazine was in deep financial trouble. It could not seem to attract national advertisers and, without national advertisers, it did not appear that it could survive. Despite Johnson’s sales efforts to convince space buyers that blacks bought cars and smoked cigarettes as well as whites, Detroit and the tobacco industry—and other national advertisers—remained unimpressed. Then Johnson had an idea. Many of the black people he knew, including his mother, owned Zenith radios. He is still not sure why, but Zenith is a popular brand name with blacks. Johnson wrote to Zenith’s president, Eugene McDonald, and asked for an appointment to discuss advertising. McDonald’s response, at first, was chilly; advertising was not his department, he said. But Johnson, not to be put down, wrote to McDonald again, and asked to see him about Zenith’s business policy. This got him an appointment, and a toe in the door. Before going to see McDonald, however, Johnson did a bit of homework on the man. McDonald, he learned, had once accompanied Admiral Peary on an expedition to the North Pole. So had a black explorer named Mathew Hensen, who had written a book on the experience. To his meeting with Eugene McDonald, John Johnson brought an autographed copy of Hensen’s book, which he presented to the president. He got his ad. Following Zenith’s lead, other national advertisers began following suit.
Still, the going was not always easy for the young publisher and his publications. In 1949, when Johnson was ready to acquire his first office building, he found a suitable one that was for sale on the South Side. It belonged to a white
undertaker who, because the neighborhood was becoming integrated, was eager to move elsewhere. But the mortician was unwilling to sell to a black, and turned down Johnson’s offer of $60,000. More cunning was required and, to trick the undertaker, Johnson deployed a white lawyer to act as his agent. The lawyer succeeded in buying the building for Johnson for only $52,000, but first asked if he could send a maintenance man over to inspect the premises. The mortician agreed, and John Johnson, disguised as a maintenance man, wearing white overalls, a cap, and carrying a flashlight, came to inspect his new purchase. “There’s no use getting angry at a white man like that,” Johnson says today. “All you’ve got to do is try to outsmart him.”
Most successful black men would agree with Johnson. Most of their business lives have been spent not trying to integrate with the white establishment, but to outsmart it at its own game.
Today, Life is dead, and Ebony flourishes, with a circulation of over 1,300,000 copies, its pages crammed with national advertising. Ebony, furthermore, is one of the few remaining “big” magazines that has not, for reasons of economy, been forced to reduce its page size—though Ebony’s bulky weight costs the Johnson Publishing Company well over a million dollars a year in postage. The Johnson Publishing Company now publishes five different magazines—Ebony Jr.!, Black Stars, Jet, Black World, and its flagship, Ebony. The company is now in the book publishing business too, owns an AM radio station in Chicago, and has moved out of the South Side into the new eleven-story building on Michigan Avenue, as prestigious a business address as Lake Shore Drive is a residential one. The Johnson Building, also sumptuously decorated and furnished, contains a quarter-million-dollar collection of paintings and sculpture by black artists and a top-floor executive suite that is very nearly as spectacular as the Johnson apartment. The company’s annual sales are in the neighborhood of forty million dollars, and the little empire has also extended into real estate, insurance, and banks. John Johnson today sits on the board of Zenith, as well as a number of other companies, including Bell & Howell, Greyhound, and Twentieth Century-Fox. He is also chairman of the board and largest single stockholder of the Supreme Life Insurance Company of America, the company that first hired him as an office boy, and where he feels that his services have compensated for the early borrowed use of the company’s printing presses.
Certain People Page 3