John H. Johnson
Pawned his mother's furniture to launch a magazine when no bank would lend to a Black publisher
John H. Johnson was born in 1918 in Arkansas City, Arkansas, the son of a sawmill worker who died in an accident when John was six. His mother worked as a domestic servant, and the family lived through periods of real hardship, including time on welfare relief during the Depression, before moving to Chicago in 1933 in search of better opportunities than the segregated South offered.
He excelled at a mostly Black Chicago high school and won a scholarship of sorts through a speech competition that brought him to the attention of an insurance executive who gave him a part-time job, letting him attend university while working. Reading through insurance company clippings about Black life across America convinced him there was an audience for a magazine that reported positively on Black achievement, a genre almost entirely absent from mainstream publishing at the time.
No bank would lend a young Black man money to start a magazine, so in 1942 he borrowed five hundred dollars against his mother's furniture as collateral and used it to launch Negro Digest, mailing subscription offers to acquaintances and building an initial readership through sheer persistence. Its success let him launch Ebony in 1945 and Jet in 1951, both of which became central institutions in Black American cultural and political life, covering entertainment, business and civil rights news that white-owned publications largely ignored.
Johnson Publishing grew into the largest Black-owned publishing company in the United States, and Johnson became the first Black American included on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, a milestone he reached from a childhood shaped by his mother's furniture being pledged for a magazine few thought would survive its first year.