It is hard to overstate the ubiquity of Ebony and Jet magazines in black households and businesses across America from the 1950s through the late 1990s. Read: The museum grappling with the future of black America Without the images, future generations would not have the evidence, documentation, and the wealth of knowledge that can be acquired from the photographs.” “The worst case scenario would have been that the Ebony photo archive would be sold to a private owner and no one would have access to the vast images. “If the sale had not been acquired through the partnership of the four foundations, it would have been deeply disappointing, to say the least, to archivists whose work it is to not only organize and preserve archival material but to make them accessible,” Jina DuVernay, a visiting archivist of African American collections at Emory University, told me via email. The archives will be donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Getty Research Institute. Last week, after much anxiety over the fate of nearly 4 million historic photographs, those archives were sold at auction for $30 million to a consortium of the nation’s leading private foundations. And in April, after a decade of struggling with the shift of publishing in the digital era, the Johnson Publishing Company filed for bankruptcy, arranging to put its photo archives (valued at $46 million in 2015) up for sale. In 2016, Ebony was sold to a private-equity firm. Ebony, Johnson said, aimed to “show not only the Negroes but also white people that Negroes got married, had beauty contests, gave parties, ran successful businesses, and did all the other normal things of life.” As Life magazine ascended in popularity among the white American middle class and depicted a new consumerist ideal, quotidian black American culture was conspicuously absent from the narratives. Building on the success of the periodical, he launched Ebony magazine in 1945, and later Jet magazine in 1951. Johnson started his publishing empire with a $500 loan, launching Negro Digest (later renamed Black World) in 1942. Sleet is just one photographer who has pieces from his extensive body of work in the archives of the Johnson Publishing Company, which for more than 70 years was the foremost chronicler of African American life and culture in mass-communication media. He became the first African American photographer and journalist to receive the award. The picture won Sleet the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1969. But it almost wasn’t taken: When arrangements for press-pool access to the funeral neglected to include a black photographer, Coretta Scott King insisted that Sleet-who’d photographed the King family for Ebony magazine since 1955-be let in or no press would be allowed inside at all. The image, which was disseminated via dozens of wires, would become one of Sleet’s most iconic pictures. It is 5-year-old Bernice King’s eyes lingering in the camera’s gaze that haunt the viewer. In a 1968 photograph taken by Moneta Sleet Jr., a veiled and stoic Coretta Scott King comforts her youngest child at the funeral of her husband, Martin Luther King Jr.
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