Color Success Black

Negroes--particularly middle-class Negroes--often complain that the only blacks who ever get into print are athletes, performers, rioters and occasional politicians. They ask: What about the rest of us? The ones who are going to school, making it through college, getting engaged, marrying, succeeding at a job? The rather lame answer can only be that, here and there, more black faces are beginning to appear in society and business columns of a few newspapers scattered across the country. But where Negro success makes surefire copy is between the covers of Ebony magazine.

Appropriately enough, the magazine that honors success is one itself. After 22 years of publishing, Ebony has a circulation of 1,054,932, almost all of it Negro. It bulges with ads; revenue totaled $7,000,000 last year. Its publisher, John H. Johnson, puts out three other magazines as well: Jet (circ. 453,095), a pocket-size weekly of news tidbits; Tan (121,392), a monthly combination of homemaking advice and love stories; and Negro Digest (40,000), a literary monthly. Since he is also board chairman of Supreme Life Insurance Co. and owns a cosmetics company, Johnson is one of the wealthiest Negro businessmen in the U.S.

From a Negro Angle. The Johnson publications are straightforwardly of, by and for Negroes. News of the world is almost exclusively colored black. The July issue covered the funeral of Bobby Kennedy by running photos of the prominent Negroes who attended: Cleveland Mayor Carl B. Stokes, Rafer Johnson, Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr., among others. The accompanying story was a perceptive account of Bobby's growth as a civil rights leader. In a previous issue, U.S. Senators got their pictures in the magazine only because they happen to frequent the Senate restaurant presided over by a Negro maitre d'hotel, Robert Parker Jr. Said the story: "Even for Senator Richard Russell (D., Ga.), who is not noted for his high esteem for Negroes, 'there is only one maitre d' in the U.S.--Parker.' "

An earthy, plain-spoken businessman who has lived in Chicago all his adult life, Johnson, 50, is less the brilliant innovator than a shrewd judge of the Negro community. He has been careful not to get too far ahead of the times--or too far behind. He started Ebony, he said in his prospectus, "to emphasize the brighter side of Negro life and success." As the darker side has come more into view, Ebony has adjusted. Last winter, Senior Editor Lerone Bennett Jr. provoked considerable controversy and a stern rebuttal from the New York Times when he wrote an article debunking Abraham Lincoln as the "embodiment of the American racist tradition." As part of the same mood, whites have been replaced by Negroes in ads in the magazine, though some readers are upset because Ebony continues to run ads for hair straighteners and skin lighteners.

Dedicated to Negro integration and achievement in a basically white society, Ebony cannot take black separatism too seriously. Unlike some Negro publications, it has not banned the word Negro, but uses it interchangeably with the more fashionable "black." A recent editorial tried good-humoredly to put the matter in perspective. It described an after-dinner speaker who began: "Mr. Chairman, distinguished platform guests and my fellow Afro-Americans, Negro, Black, Colored, Soul Brothers and Sisters ..." To some militants, including some members of the staff, Ebony is too smugly middleclass. To which Executive Editor Herbert Nipson replies: "Some people expect Ebony, because it is a Negro magazine, to print propaganda for every black program that comes along. But we're not an organ for anybody. Not for the N.A.A.C.P., not for CORE, not for S.N.C.C."

George Washington's Vixen. Negroes who are dissatisfied with Ebony's moneymaking nonmilitancy need only turn to Johnson's money-losing Negro Digest--a strenuous voice of Black Power. Writing that is roughly eloquent mingles with writing that is just plain rough. "Every white throat cut is a success in itself," was one writer's contribution to racial amity. Digest was one of the first publications to take exception to The Confessions of Nat Turner on the ground that White Novelist William Styron was incapable of putting himself inside the skin of a 19th century Negro slave. More effective was a satire apparently written in answer to it. Just as Styron placed himself in the position of Turner, so did pseudonymous Author F. Tuy Holrel write in the first person about George Washington. The Father of His Country is obsessed with a winsome Negro lass at Mount Vernon ("vixen of my terrible desire"), but he loses her ultimately to a supervirile Negro slave.

Even though Johnson does not personally subscribe to the theories advanced in Digest, he obviously feels a duty to keep on publishing it, despite the fact that it loses between $80,000 and $100,000 a year. He is happy to see its authors win prizes, as they occasionally do, and make their way into anthologies. "I think it's important," he says, "that all elements of the black movement be represented in the magazines." But he has no plans to replace a tolerance of diversity with a rigid creed. "Essentially, our policy is an inspirational one," he says. "We try to motivate those who are coming up in the world, to show them that there are no barriers, no restrictions, that they have as much right to become a professional golfer as to become President of the U.S."

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