Good advice from John H. Johnson

By A. Peter Bailey
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

An article in the November 20, 1990 issue of the Richmond Times-Dispatch that was supplied by the New York Times Service opens as follows, “John H. Johnson, the owner of Ebony of Jet magazines and one of the richest Black Americans, is not altogether happy that 12 percent of his readers are white. ‘That is more than I would like to have,’ he said, ‘I want to be king of the Black hill, not the mixed hill.’” The article also noted that Mr. Johnson “says he would never invite a white person to dinner unless that person had first invited him.”

Those must have been somewhat startling statements to the “nothing-will-do-but-total-integration” advocates and to those Black power advocates who considered Mr. Johnson as basically a white man with Black skin. What it demonstrates is that Mr. Johnson — despite what we sometimes saw in Ebony, was — to use the very old school term I first heard from my grandfather and his friends — a race man. He never put whites on the cover of his magazines in order to get their subscriptions. In fact, whites on Ebony’s covers are so rare that those magazines are eagerly sought by serious collectors at the Annual Black Memorabilia show held every spring in Gaithersburg, Md. The only white to ever be on an Ebony cover alone was Carroll O’Conner from the Archie Bunker television program. I once sold one of those for a nice piece of change.

Unfortunately, most of those who are either in positions of Black leadership or who aspire for such positions don’t want to be kings of the Black hill. They want to hustle “leadership” of Black folks into elected or appointed political offices, corporate jobs, television hosts or faculty positions at Harvard, Yale or Princeton.

Can one imagine where we would be as a people if Brother Malcolm, Dr. King, Dorothy Height, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers and others like them had been motivated to Black leadership only as a stepping stone to a position with some major white institution, corporation, university or an appointed or elected political office. A group of people needs leadership whose goal is to be an effective representative of their people to other racial, ethnic or nationality groups, leaders who will not be hesitant about promoting and protecting their people’s interests because of fear of losing their positions.

Serious attention should be paid to the advice to young people offered by Mr. Johnson in the article: “If you are satisfied with vice president, fine. But if, like me, you are temperamentally unsuited to that and want to reach the top, do something else.” In other words, don’t just strive to work for the New York Times and its equivalents in other arenas. Instead, learn all you can and set up your own institution or business.

This article was originally published in the July 2, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper