The Rotary Club of Little Rock recently hosted a panel discussion about John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet magazines, and the establishment of the John H. Johnson Cultural and Educational Museum in Arkansas City, his hometown.
The speakers included Arkansas City native and former speaker of the Arkansas House of Representatives Robert Moore, who spearheaded the museum project, along with former Arkansas City Mayor Richard Hales and Calvin Johnson, former interim chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.
Chris Mangum, club programs chair, introduced the speakers and recalled learning John Johnson was from Arkansas City after meeting him at a conference.
“A lot of people, maybe, don’t know his story, and it’s a really interesting story,” he said. “It’s a really interesting Arkansas story.”
Mangum, from left, Hales, Calvin Johnson and Robert Moore
Born in Arkansas City in 1918, Johnson moved to Chicago in 1933 and went on to achieve success as the publisher of the two prominent magazines. He detailed his life story in his autobiography, “Succeeding Against the Odds.”
Moore, who noted that he was born in Arkansas City about 25 years after Johnson, said the most important part of Johnson’s story is “what he had to overcome and how quickly he overcame to reach the pinnacle of success that he did.”
“It was a world, back then, that Mr. Johnson knew that was filled with segregation, prejudice and discrimination,” he said. “That’s what he knew as a child growing up there, and in the world we live in today, I see too much of what I call ‘attempts to sanitize history’ that we tend to think that if it makes people uncomfortable, we don’t want to talk about it.
“We want to act like that didn’t exist, and from my personal standpoint at this point in my life, I think there’s nothing, as a nation, more important than to recognize our history, our many great accomplishments, but also our faults because a nation, in my opinion, like individuals who fail to acknowledge their shortcomings, continue them or repeat them, and so I think, to me, our history is our guiding light to our future of a better and more civilized society.”
Calvin Johnson
Arkansas City remained segregated into Moore’s childhood during the 1950s, and Moore noted that the only integration he remembered was that his father, the county sheriff, hired an African American deputy. Moore choked up while reflecting on his upbringing and that of fellow speaker Calvin Johnson, who grew up about 25 miles away in Jerome.
“We’re about the same age, and we grew up in the same exact environment, except Calvin was on the Black side of the street, and I was on the white side,” he said. “Again, going back to the history, it was a tough time, but in my mind, it’s times that need to be remembered so we don’t allow ourselves to go down any similar path in the future.”
Moore presented slides from Arkansas City as he discussed John Johnson’s rise to fame, including photos of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which Johnson told Moore was a pivotal moment during his childhood because it forced Black people and white people in close proximity to each other as they sought the high ground of the Mississippi levee.
Mississippi Flood
“All of a sudden, this great dichotomy between Black and white in the community, it existed no more because they all lived in tents; they lived side by side and they had to get along with one another in order to survive,” Moore said. “He said later in life that that was a profound experience on him because he thought that the world was separate, but when forced into that by a catastrophic situation, they became as one.”
A highly intelligent child, Johnson graduated top of his class in the eighth grade, the highest level of education available to African Americans in Arkansas City at the time, then traveled with his mother to Chicago, where he finished school and took a job at an insurance company. Part of his work was to publish a company newsletter.
Recognizing there was no African American Reader’s Digest or LIFE Magazine, Johnson saw an opportunity and started Negro Digest and Johnson Publishing Co. in 1942 with a $500 bank loan, using his mother’s furniture as collateral.
Moore said it is remarkable that it only took 12 years for Johnson to go from his humble upbringing in Arkansas City to publishing the first edition of Ebony in 1945 at age 27. Three years later, he became a millionaire.
“The reason I’m telling this story and the importance of it is I never knew any of this — didn’t know,” he said. “We never heard of Mr. John H. Johnson because we were still segregated, and I can’t say with certainty. All I knew is we didn’t know. It was never talked about. It wasn’t in our schools. It wasn’t in our churches. [There] wasn’t anything about what this man accomplished. Nobody else had done anything remotely akin to that.”
John Johnson and Robert Moore in 1995
Moore eventually learned about Johnson and, inspired by roadtrip visits to small towns across the country, his wife, Beverly, told him there should be a John Johnson museum in Arkansas City. In 1995, Moore traveled to Chicago to meet Johnson and discuss the project.
“I think you can see from that smile on his face he liked the idea that I’d come up there wanting to do something to honor him, and I hadn’t come asking something from him to take back home,” he said, displaying a photo from the occasion. “I think we forged a friendship from that day that lasted until he died in 2005.”
Calvin Johnson agreed that while many people know about John Johnson, few know he was from Arkansas City.
“Of course, when I grew up, and on the side of the road where I was, Robert, the publication from John Johnson was only second to Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck,” he said, “so we knew about the publication, but we never thought about who was publishing those things.”
Arkansas group visits Johnson in Chicago
Calvin Johnson added that Moore’s relationship with John Johnson helped the projects proceed smoothly.
“When we started on this project, I didn’t know why things were just happening so easy on the Chicago side with Mr. Johnson,” he said, “but after listening to Robert this afternoon, you can see that was easy to follow because Mr. Johnson was thoroughly convinced that he wanted to do that project that Robert went to him and talked about.”
Johnson’s boyhood home was ultimately moved to the courthouse to become the John H. Johnson Cultural and Educational Museum, and there is also a statue of Johnson in the city at the John H. Johnson Commemorative Plaza at Delta Heritage Trail State Park. John H. Johnson Day, a statewide holiday, is recognized every year on Nov. 1.
Statue of John H. Johnson
“You can never guess what a small group of people can do if they’re willing to work together, and that is what happened with this project,” Calvin Johnson said, “so in closing, I want to say that we are very proud of what has been done, and we know that we still have a lot of work to do.”
Hales, who grew up in Monticello, said that like his fellow speakers, he did not know about John Johnson’s story until later in life when he moved to Arkansas City.
“I found that as a very tragic situation,” he said. “I was 30 miles from this town where this man did the ascent, they did business greatness, and the story never crossed my mind, and as I watched my friend [Moore] present earlier, and I saw how emotional it was to talk about where those two gentlemen lived. That’s the essence of why we’re doing the work we’re doing now. We can never have that happen again.”
He encouraged attendees to come see the museum and plaza for themselves.
John H. Johnson Commemorative Plaza
“Oddly enough, towns of 300 are drying up all over the place,” he said. “I’m in Mississippi half as much as I’m in Arkansas now. I see on that side, as well, but the fact is Arkansas City is a county seat, and I don’t know who’s responsible for that, but it’s still the county seat. The reality is it’s going to be there. It’s not a little town that’s going to dry up and blow away. We’re very proud of it.”
Moore said the Johnson museum has been a catalyst for other developments in Arkansas City, including the Delta Heritage Trail State Park. He recalled his last conversation with Johnson.
“He thanked me for the efforts that were started in Chicago and getting up there,” Moore said, “but he looked at me and he said, ‘It’s really nice that y’all have managed to do these things and put this together, but what are you going to do with it?’ and so I told him, I said, ‘What we’re going to do with it, we’re going to use your legacy as part of our history to build and revitalize this town that you came from so that you would be proud.’”
Feature Photo Credit: Rotary Club of Little Rock/Facebook
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