Remembering John Harold Johnson - Black Businessman and Hero: Some Lessons for "Living" African Entrepreneurs
By Ben Nakomo
John H. Johnson borrowed 500 dollars in 1942, and over the next six decades he built a publishing empire that chronicled the Black American experience. Within Sixty years, John H. Johnson single handedly created the Black consumer market.Before the introduction of Ebony magazine in November 1945, there were Black newspapers, and even a sprinkling of radio stations catering to the Black audiences. But for advertisers, especially those that were nationally recognized, the Black consumer market did not exist and neither did the need to advertise to it. Johnson sent a salesman to Detroit every week for ten years before an automaker agreed to buy ads in Ebony. John Harold Johnson, the magazine publisher, born January 19 1918; died August 8 2005.
According the Guardian Newspaper, "when black America wants to know about itself, the world hidden behind the curtains of the major media, it turns to Ebony and Jet magazines, both of which were founded and published by John H Johnson, who died of heart failure at age 87."
When he died in 2005, the "Black Journalist" online news portal profiled him as follows:
After publishing the Negro Digest for three years, Johnson founded Ebony magazine. His depictions of notable African-Americans helped boost the circulation from 25-thousand copies in November of 1945, to about two (m) million per month today. The company's Jet magazine has been published weekly since 1951. Johnson Publications also owns Ebony Man magazine and Fashion Fair Cosmetics.
Johnson's first publication, Negro Digest, offered advertisers the first national media vehicle targeted to the Black audience. But the magazine's lifeblood was the revenue generated from single copy sales and subscriptions from the circulation of 100,000 monthly copies. While subscribers were plentiful, advertising was slim. So much so that Johnson decided to create his own line of hair products and advertise them in the same pages major advertisers bypassed.
With the introduction of Ebony, his second magazine, the budding entrepreneur established the first media vehicle capable of delivering color advertising messages to African-Americans coast-to-coast. But despite the uniqueness of this opportunity, and more than 400,000 copies sold per month, advertisers would not consider Ebony as they readily did other publications targeted to White America. Undeterred, Johnson decided the only solution was to meet the challenge head on and persuade advertisers, one by one, that they simply could not succeed without taking his readers seriously.
"I intended to deal with the problem by persuading corporations and advertising executives to give Ebony the same consideration they gave Life and Look [magazines]," wrote Johnson in his autobiography, "Succeeding Against the Odds: The Autobiography of a Great American Businessman." "To do that I had to convince corporations and advertising executives that there was an untapped, underdeveloped market larger and more affluent than some of the White foreign markets," Johnson recalled.
After employing both Black and White salesmen to pitch Ebony to advertising agencies, Johnson decided to assume the role of delivering the message himself. He took to the task with unrelenting tenacity, cultivating personal relationships with marketers, and galvanizing his readers to personally write letters to companies reluctant to spend money in their favorite publication. 
Persistence finally paid off, but the struggle never ended. "We broke through the plate glass of invisibility by proving that Black consumers not only existed but that they bought more name brand products than White consumers," wrote Johnson. "We proved, for example, that Blacks were buying, proportionately more premium Scotch and more big cars than their White counterparts."
But even when confronted with the research, advertisers refused to support the Johnson Publishing Co. titles with dollars commensurate with their position in the market. When Ebony was first launched, African-Americans collectively earned less than $10 billion annually. Today, with those earnings approaching $700 billion, Johnson still has never had the luxury of taking advertising for granted.
In at least one instance, Johnson felt that perhaps he was battling far greater forces than he imagined when taking on the advertising establishment. Once he had spent years cultivating the ad manager for Sears.
"I sent birthday, holiday and anniversary cards. I tried in every way I could to sell him. Then, on a day I'll never forget, he said 'John, I think we're going to do it.' Would you believe it - he died a day or so later of a heart attack. I said to myself, 'Even the Lord doesn't want us to have this account."
Johnson persevered and went on to build one of the most enviable businesses in the country, with $498 million in sales last year. More than 25 percent of that revenue derived from advertising sales in Ebony and Jet, which collectively now boast a circulation of more than 5 million copies a month.
The secret of Johnson's success lies in his steady insistence in his company's mission - delivering positive portrayals of African-Americans, and securing value from advertisers for the audience he delivered.
As an entrepreneur who rose from poverty to ranks of the nation's richest individuals selling products that catered to the needs of Black consumers, Johnson is clear about the larger role of race in his accomplishments. "I've talked to scores of Black millionaires who say, almost to a man or woman that they made money not because of race, but in spite of race…If I hadn't operated with the handicap of racial barriers, I could have made billions instead of millions."
There are lessons in Johnson's life for African Entrepreneur's with floating dreams in the continent. The Johnson philosophy of "will and determination" is a consumable in the plate of aspirants aiming for the summit on the black hill of success.
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