On the heels of his success with Ebony, the African American version of Life, Chicago magazine publisher John H. Johnson was looking to start a new publication in 1951. Magazine trends that year pointed away from the large-format publications such as Life, Look, and Ebony to pocket-sized digests, fast information for busy readers. Johnson envisioned a black version of Quick, a short-lived mainstream news digest, providing a weekly synopsis of important news and events for African Americans. Jet magazine, introduced on November 1, 1951, quickly gained acceptance among blacks for providing understandable, accurate information, and they came to view it as the definitive word on current events, the so-called "Negro's bible." In the process of achieving that fame, Jet was also the first national publication to print the photograph of the corpse of a fourteen-year-old boy lynched for whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955. That picture alerted African Americans, especially those in the press, to the building civil rights movement in the South a full year before the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott.
Quick, a vest pocket-sized magazine featuring capsulized news that Americans could read "on the bus or in the beauty parlor," was introduced by Gardner Cowles, Jr., the publisher of Look, in 1949. It represented a problem for advertisers because its small size, four by six inches, required special advertising copy, and Cowles discontinued the publication in 1953 due to a lack of advertising. John H. Johnson, the Chicago magazine publisher who had started his business with a $500 loan from his mother in 1942, planned to use the profits of Ebony to support his new pocket-sized publication until advertisers could adjust. The word "jet" was tailor-made for his purposes, meaning dark velvet-black on one level, fast on another. "In the world today, everything is moving along at a faster clip," Johnson wrote in the first issue. "Each week will bring you complete news coverage on happenings among Negroes all over the U.S.—in entertainment, politics, sports, social events as well as features on personalities, places and events." The first issue of Jet sold out and garnered a circulation of 300,000 within six months, making it the largest black news magazine in the world.
Jet was still a new publication during the tempestuous 1950s but lynching was an old problem in the South, dating back to slavery. The U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case had made the South a dangerous place for blacks again, a fact that visiting Northern blacks did not always recognize. When fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a Chicago boy visiting relativesin Money, Mississippi, allegedly whistled at a white woman in August 1955, he was lynched and his corpse mutilated. His mother asked photographers to shoot pictures of his mangled body when it was returned to Chicago for burial. Johnson and his editors agonized over the gruesome photographs but published them in the September 15, 1955, Jet, providing the first national coverage of the murder. The issue sold out, traumatizing African Americans and preparing "the way for the Freedom Movement of the sixties," as Johnson recalled. An interracial team of Jet and Ebony reporters and photographers covered the resulting trial in Mississippi, alerting other Northern journalists to the deteriorating situation in the South. The Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, begun by Rosa Parks and led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, was born a year later, on December 1, 1955.
Jet went on to cover the civil rights movement, along with other business, education, religion, health, medicine, journalism, politics, labor, and crime news of the day. In the 1990s its contents were set: "Census" was a weekly digest of births and deaths. "Ticker Tape" was a Walter Winchell style feature discussing news and news personalities written by Washington D.C. bureau chief Simon Booker. "This Week in Black History" provided a recap of traditional and more recent historical events. "People are Talking About" offered gossip about personalities. "Sports" provided an overview of black athletes and predominantly black teams and "Jet Beauty of the Week" showed a traditional bathing beauty. The magazine also listed the top 20 Black singles and albums along with television highlights and a weekly photo. Jet offers no editorial comment, although the stories and images of African Americans are positive and upbeat, reflecting Johnson's conservative beliefs in free markets and working within the system. Its circulation at the end of the twentieth century was around 900,000.
Further Reading:
Dates, Jannette L., and William Barlow. Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media. Washington, D.C., Howard University Press, 1990, 374.
Johnson, John H., and Lerone Bennett, Jr. Succeeding against the Odds. New York, Warner Books, 1989.
Pride, Armistead S., and Clint C. Walker. A History of the Black Press. Washington, D.C., Howard University Press, 1997.
Walker, Daniel C. Black Journals of the United States. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1982, 213-14.
Wolseley, Roland E. The Black Press, U.S.A. 2nd edition. Ames, Iowa, Iowa State University Press, 1990, 88, 144-46.
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