John H. Johnson :: essays research papers

caper H. Johnson was born January 19, 1918 in rural are City, Arkansas. His parents were Leroy Johnson and Gertrude Jenkins Johnson. His father was killed in a sawmill accident when little John was eight old age old. He attended the communitys overcrowded, segregated elementary school. In the early 1930s, there was no public high school for African-Americans in Arkansas. His mother heard of better opportunities for African-Americans in Chicago and saved her meagerly earnings as a washerwoman and a cook and for years until she could afford to move her family to Chicago. This resulted in them becoming a part of the African-American Great Migration of 1933. There, Johnson was exposed to something he never knew existed, middle class corrosive people.Johnson enrolled in DuSable High School and was an excelling student. Because of his achievements, Johnson was invited in 1936, to speak at a dinner held by the Urban League. Harry Pace, the President of the arrogant independence sup port Insurance Company, was so impressed with Johnsons speech that he offered him a job and a scholarship to attend college part-time. But his interest cogitate primarily on the operations at the insurance firm and at long last he dropped his studies at the University of Chicago. In 1939 at the age of 21 he became the editor of Paces in-house magazine. Collecting articles culled from national publications, Johnson realizes he had struck gold.In 1941, Johnson wed Eunice Walker and found a full-time position at Supreme Liberty Life. One of Johnsons job descriptions at Supreme Liberty Life was to collect the news and information about African-Americans and prepare a hebdomadally digest for Pace. He thought that a " blackamoor newspaper" could be sold and marketed and have people to be very interested in it. In 1942, Johnson borrowed $500 from his mothers furniture and started the Johnson Publishing Company. Johnson got idea, The Negro Digest, and modeled it subsequently th e Readers Digest but it took aimed at African-Americans. He launched the Negro Digest, which took a dangerous look at racial issues and featured articles from prominent black and purity writers. The Negro Digest circulated around 50,000.The magazine featured articles about the companionable inequalities in the United States and gave a voice to the concerns of African-Americans. Within eight months the Negro Digest reached about $50,000 a month in sales.In 1945, Johnson launched his mho publication, the Ebony magazine, in which focused on the diverse achievements and successes of African-Americans.