John Johnson, who died yesterday at 87, was the most successful black publisher in America. His classic rags-to-riches biography fit in nicely with the upbeat tone of his most successful magazine, Ebony.

Johnson was also publisher of several other black-themed magazines, including Jet, and his Johnson Publishing Company came to encompass a book division; radio, television, and real estate interests, and Fashion Fair Cosmetics. In 1982, Johnson became the first black named to the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans.

The grandson of slaves, Johnson was raised in poverty in Arkansas City, Ark. His father was killed in a sawmill accident when Johnson was 6, and his mother later married another mill worker. Because Arkansas City had no high school for blacks, Johnson, an ambitious student, chose to repeat the eighth grade rather than terminate his schooling.

In 1933, the family visited the Chicago World’s Fair and decided to stay on, in part so Johnson could attend high school. The poor country boy, whose family lived on relief at first, said in later interviews that he vowed to make a success of himself to show up those who laughed at his homemade clothes. Johnson was an honor student and was president of his class, president of the student council, editor of the school paper, and business manager of the yearbook.

At a 1936 banquet to honor the city’s outstanding black high school seniors, Johnson impressed a leading businessman, Harry Herbert Pace. A music entrepreneur and president of the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company – then among the largest black owned companies in Chicago – Pace encouraged Johnson to attend classes at the University of Chicago, and he hired the young man to edit Supreme Liberty’s in-house newsletter, the Guardian, which was essentially a compilation of news clippings of interest to blacks.

A light bulb was illuminated with an almost visible flash. In his autobiography, “Succeeding Against the Odds,” Johnson said he foresaw “a black gold mine.”

In 1942, Johnson borrowed $500 – using his mother’s furniture as collateral – and mailed 20,000 letters to Supreme Life customers, offering them a $2 charter subscription to Negro Digest. He garnered 3,000 subscriptions, and a publishing empire was born.

Negro Digest was conceived as an answer to Reader’s Digest, and it addressed the black experience with columns such as “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience.” With energetic newsstand marketing, the magazine was soon selling 50,000 copies a month. When Eleanor Roosevelt wrote one of the regular “If I Were a Negro” features, circulation jumped to 150,000. In 1949, Johnson opened new offices at a converted funeral parlor on South Michigan Avenue.

Johnson next conceived of Ebony, meant to be something like Life, with an emphasis on personality profiles of the “talented tenth,” the cream of black society. The first issue sold out its 25,000 print run, and the hard-selling Johnson soon convinced more mainstream advertisers, such as Zenith and Chesterfield cigarettes, to join the mainstays of black publishing: advertisements of cosmetics, hair-straighteners, and other ethnic products. He once said he sent a salesman to Detroit weekly for 10 years before convincing a car company to advertise in Ebony.

After starting out as a somewhat sensational publication, Ebony settled into the family-friendly, inspirational fare that it carries to this day. If some black leaders criticized the magazine’s sometimes-timid approach to civil rights, others celebrated it.

“To the slum dwellers who pick it up in the barbershop or plunk down 50 cents for it on the newsstands, it offers the hope of a better life for men with black skins,” the author A. James Reichley wrote in Fortune magazine in 1968. “For the new Negro middle class, it is a source of racial pride. For the militants, it provides proof of their credo that Negroes have the talent and the initiative to succeed at any calling.”

Johnson soon added more titles to his burgeoning stable. Tan Confessions, begun in 1950, quickly turned into a women’s magazine, Tan. Hue was a short-lived, small-format magazine of features. The most successful of Johnson’s subsequent magazines was Jet, a magazine oriented more toward the youth market.

Negro Digest was suspended in 1951, then resurrected briefly as a literary quarterly.

In 1962 Johnson began his book publishing division, with “Burn, Killer, Burn,” a novel by a rehabilitated murderer. He also purchased a controlling interest in Supreme Liberty Life Insurance.

In 1971, the company was the first black-owned enterprise to locate its headquarters in the Chicago Loop, and today it has offices in New York, Los An geles, Washington, D.C., Detroit, London, and Paris.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, politicians began taking note of Johnson’s influence in the black community. In 1957, Johnson accompanied Vice President Nixon on a goodwill tour of nine African nations, and he later accompanied Nixon to Poland and Russia. He sat on the boards of several corporations, including Dial, Zenith Radio, and Chrysler, and received many prestigious awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he accepted in 1996.

Johnson was known for never vacationing, but in recent years he had slowed down a bit as the company’s management passed into the hands of his daughter, Linda Johnson Rice.

On his company’s Web site, he is quoted as saying earlier this year, “When I go in to see people – and I sell an occasional ad now – I never say, ‘Help me because I am black’ or ‘Help me because I am a minority.’ I always talk about what we can do for them.”

John Harold Johnson
Born January 19, 1918, in Arkansas City, Ark.; died August 8 in Chicago, Il.; survived by his wife, Eunice, and daughter, Linda Johnson Rice.