john h johnson interview usa today with dr barbara reynolds in the book And Still We Rise

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,

My Life, My Love, My Legacy: The Memoirs of Coretta Scott King

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My Life, My Love, My Legacy: The Memoirs of Coretta Scott King
Product Details

All copies purchased here include:

  • Authentic Autograph by the Author Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds
Born in 1927 to daringly enterprising parents in the Deep South, Coretta Scott had always felt called to a special purpose. While enrolled as one of the first black scholarship students recruited to Antioch College, she became politically and socially active and committed to the peace movement. As a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music, determined to pursue her own career as a concert singer, she met Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister insistent that his wife stay home with the children. But in love and devoted to shared Christian beliefs as well as shared racial and economic justice goals, she married Dr. King, and events promptly thrust her into a maelstrom of history throughout which she was a strategic partner, a standard bearer, and so much more.
As a widow and single mother of four, she worked tirelessly to found and develop The King Center as a citadel for world peace, lobbied for fifteen years for the US national holiday in honor of her husband, championed for women’s, workers’ and gay rights and was a powerful international voice for nonviolence, freedom and human dignity.

Coretta’s is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an extraordinary black woman in twentieth-century America, a brave leader who, in the face of terrorism and violent hatred, stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful every day of her life.

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