John H. Johnson, born in 1918 in Arkansas City, AR. He was president of Johnson Publications located in Chicago where he founded Jet, Ebony, EM magazines, and Negro Digest.
Discrimination was so severe in the 1940’s when he launched his first magazines, Johnson had to dress up like a janitor and accompany a white lawyer to be able to enter the building he later bought as his headquarters. When he tried to obtain ads from white firms and to get white corporations to carry his cosmetic lines he was refused.
Nevertheless, he found ingenious ways to break down the barriers, eventually being listed in Forbes magazine as one of the USA’s 400 richest people. Quite an honor for a man, who started his enterprise with $500 he borrowed against his mother’s furniture.
He published my first poetry, gave me my first major journalism job as an assistant editor of Ebony and successfully nominated me for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. He gave me valuable tips about success, which I share in And Still We Rise. He died in 2005. His magazines ceased publication in in April 2019, ending the company’s 77–year run.
Read our interview from April 16th, 1986 with USA Today in this book with 49 other powerful interviews,
All copies purchased here include:
-Authentic Autograph by the Author
Bishop Alfred A. Owens, Jr: has risen from a storefront preacher to a world stage of evangelism. He struggles through life without the love of a father; yet he has become a spiritual father to thousands.
With the same exuberance in which he once preached to seven people, his messages of hope now reach millions. While other churches flee the ghetto for Doing Good in the Hood the affluent suburbs, he proudly affirms his congregation “as the church in the hood that will do you good.”
He extols his congregants in a mission to “rise up and build.” As he continues to plant churches worldwide, he still walks humbly, loves deeply and has surrendered all to the Gospel. Bishop Alfred Owens has combined spiritual fervor and seminary training to build one of the nation’s most effective Pentecostal institutions.
