According to his autobiography, after graduating high school in 1936, John H. Johnson attended an Urban League luncheon where Harry H. Pace spoke. Pace was the CEO of Supreme Liberty Life Insurance, which provided insurance to the Black community. John rushed Pace after his speech. Pace had heard about John’s commencement speech and asked about his plans. John shared that he couldn’t afford college, and Pace offered him a part-time job at Supreme.
In September 1936, John started working part-time for $25 per month and eventually quit school to work at Supreme full-time. Supreme was the perfect environment for John and became the university where he would learn all things business over five years. Watching and learning as Pace navigated a million-dollar business gave John a thrill.
Journalism was John’s passion, and Pace assigned John to work on Supreme’s monthly newsletter. Pace was the editor, so John worked closely with him. In 1939, John was named editor. John learned as much as he could from Pace about business, life, success, and Black America as he chauffeured him to the bank every day. Lessons about focus, computerizing your mind, business being an art, and others stuck with John; he used them throughout his career.
John eventually moved to selling insurance in the field and even supported Supreme’s general counsel running for local office. By then, Supreme wasn’t just a job for John; it was the place where he was learning how to navigate life and achieve his goals.
In 1940, John met Eunice Walker, who came from a prominent southern family. Eunice’s friends told her John’s background wasn’t encouraging and he wasn’t one of the Black professionals who were likely to succeed. Eunice saw something else in John, and John relished how she listened to his dreams and made him feel that he could be somebody one day. They married in June 1942.
Pace didn’t want to take Black newspapers home. He asked John to read magazines and newspapers and prepare digests of what was happening in the Black world, which John did on Mondays. Pace used them to stay abreast of race relations and guide his conversations. John became one of the most knowledgeable people in Black Chicago. At social gatherings, he became the center of attention when he began sharing what he’d learned. People kept asking, “Where can I find that article?” and offered to pay him to find specific articles.
After several weeks, John realized he was “looking at a black gold mine.” Readers Digest and Time were popular, but there wasn’t a successful, Black, commercial magazine. But after two months of going from office to office in Black Chicago, John realized that nobody wanted to give a twenty-four-year-old insurance worker a cent toward this idea.
John was running the machine that mailed invoices to 20,000 Supreme customers. He looked around and asked himself what he could do by himself with what he had to get what he wanted. Then it hit him: he could send a letter to each of Supreme’s customers asking if they wanted to prepay for a $2 subscription to a new, Black magazine. Pace blessed the idea. John just needed one last thing: $500 to buy stamps. Desperate, he tried to get a bank loan but was turned down. Eventually, he found a bank that loaned to Blacks, but he needed collateral. He didn’t know what that meant, and he didn’t have it anyway.
After much prayer and pestering by John, his mother put up her furniture as collateral. John wrote his letter, pitching his magazine as something that appealed to what Black customers craved at the time: respect and recognition. He mailed it and crossed his fingers. It worked. Three thousand people sent John $6,000. Negro Digest Publishing was born in June 1942.
John worked by day at Supreme and by night on the magazine. Eunice helped him at night too. By October he was ready to print but needed a printer who would extend credit. John ran the duplicating machine at Supreme and managed Supreme’s relationship with Progress Printing Company. When John said to the printer, “We are publishing a magazine,” the printer assumed the magazine was for or backed by Supreme and started working without worrying about being paid.
On Sunday, November 1, 1942, Negro Digest was officially published. John realized the true potential of what he’d created when he held the first magazine.
John had successfully launched Negro Publishing, but it was a one-man company, and he wasn’t out of the woods yet. He printed 5,000 magazines and sent 3,000 to prepaid subscribers. Now, he needed to find a way to pay for the remaining 2,000 copies and cover the mailing costs for the 3,000 copies already sent to subscribers. If he didn’t figure it out fast, he’d be in jail. This led to what he would do next.
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