1918-
Magazine Publisher

Success Story.

John H. Johnson entered publishing at age twenty-four, when, after white bankers refused to loan him money, he used his mother's furniture as collateral for a five-hundred- dollar loan in order to send out twenty thousand letters promoting a new magazine, to be called Negro Digest. By the 1990s Johnson, a multimillionaire, was the most influential and prosperous African American businessman in the country. In the intervening fifty years his magazines, particularly Ebony, had become an integral part of American culture.

Aspiration.

Johnson was born to a poor family in Arkansas City, Arkansas. When he was six his father died in a sawmill accident. Because Arkansas City had no high school for blacks, he and his mother moved to Chicago when he was in his teens on money she earned as a cook. The move paid off: Johnson excelled in...