The World-Class Photography of Ebony and Jet Is Priceless History. It’s Still Up for Sale.

It’s impossible to overstate the significance of the Johnson Publishing Company, founded in Chicago in 1942. John and Eunice Johnson began with Negro Digest, a Readers Digest for an African American audience, which quickly reached thousands of households. Ebony, the company’s flagship monthly, launched in 1945, followed by the weekly Jet in ’51. Soon Johnson Publishing emerged as a beacon of African American enterprise, in no small part because Johnson himself poached some of the top journalistic, editorial, and design talent from around the country. One catch was the Atlanta Daily World’s Lerone Bennett Jr., who eventually became Ebony’s influential executive editor and a historian whose work resonated deeply with Americans who didn’t see themselves in the history taught in schools. Celebrities—the likes of Dorothy Dandridge, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin—were featured in the magazines as their careers were taking off: they were superstars in African American living rooms but nearly unknown to the readership of photo magazines targeting a mainstream readership, like LIFE.

I’ve had anxiety about this for four years,” says Brenna W. Greer, an associate professor of history at Wellesley College who writes about race, business, and visual culture. Greer’s new book, Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship, makes the case that a key part of African Americans’ struggle for full citizenship after World War II centered on creating and managing commercial images of themselves. That made what the Johnson Publishing Company was doing crucial, she says.

But perhaps the most alarming question around licensing revolves around the possibility of charging a usage fee for sensitive items in the collection. Historians who have knowledge of what Ebony and Jet published will point, immediately, to David Jackson’s photographs of Emmett Till lying in repose at his funeral, which first ran in the September 15, 1955, issue of Jet. Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was tortured and murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi, for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

Cf. https://books.google.com/books?id=57EDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=september+15+1955+jet&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZquzw8pjjAhUYCs0KHVkxDkcQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=september%2015%201955%20jet&f=false

The publication of Jackson’s photographs of Till’s carefully dressed but badly decomposed body echoed like a thunderclap among African Americans, particularly young people who became activists in the 1960s—the “Emmett Till generation,” they would call themselves.

Cf.  https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/summer-2019/the-world-class-photography-of-emebony/em-and-emjet/em-is-priceless-history-its-still-up-for-sale