One of Arkansas’ most successful and influential Black businessmen will be honored in his hometown on Friday.
John H. Johnson Day will be celebrated from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. at the John H. Johnson Cultural and Educational Museum, 604 President St., in Arkansas City. The day is a statewide memorial holiday enacted into law in 2019 by the Arkansas Legislature in recognition of the late Johnson, founder of Johnson Publishing Co. That company was the home of Jet and Ebony magazines, two of the most influential publications of the 20th century for Black Americans.
Admission is free. Events on Friday include screenings of the Bill Morrison documentary “The Great Flood” along with “The Barber of Little Rock,” the Oscar-nominated short film by John Hoffman and Christine Turner about Black entrepreneur Arlo Washington.
Also to be featured: a business pitch competition hosted by ReMix Ideas; an architectural presentation by Colby C. Mitchell, a project manager with Self + Tucker Architects in Memphis, on the vernacular architecture of the Johnson museum, housed in Johnson’s boyhood home; and cultural and literary discussions with David Montague, Maria Hoskins, Jacinda Jones, Carole Boston Weatherford, poet Na’Tosha De’Von and storyteller Helen Sims. Heritage and music presentations will come from Black Arkansas quilt makers and music educator Dena Jennings, a Virginia humanities scholar, educator and musician who is being sponsored by the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center transformative project.
Two hundred copies of “Johnny Was His Name: The Boy Who Grew Up To Become John H. Johnson,” by Angela Courtney, founder and curator, John H. Johnson Day and curator of the John H. Johnson Museum, will be given away by the museum and Heifer International to elementary school students.
Washington, founder of People Trust Community Federal Credit Union, is among the recipients of the 2024 John H. Johnson Day Awards that will be presented on Friday. Other recipients are Trudy Moore, former Jet editor and reporter who teaches at Chicago’s Malcolm X College; Charles Graham, gospel recording artist, author, minister and evangelist; and Benito Lubazibwa, CEO of ReMix Ideas and founder of Advancing Black Entrepreneurship.
“To be an awardee at this year’s John H. Johnson Day is quite an honor for me,” Moore says. “It makes me realize that I truly am a part of the lasting legacy that he has left behind. I often use him as an example of the ‘can do’ spirit when I push my students to think outside the box, to imagine the unimaginable, in order to make their mark on the world just like Mr. Johnson did.”
Johnny Jones, a Dermott native and graduate of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, is the chair of cross cultural communications at Simmons College of Kentucky in Louisville and is helping with media relations regarding the John H. Johnson Day events.
“Right now I’m looking at posters of Ebony and Jet magazine on the walls of my office,” he says. “In any home growing up — in my parents home, my grandparents home — Ebony magazines and Jet magazines were sitting on the coffee table. That’s how you heard about John H. Johnson … it’s hard to put into words how much influence in the subtext of my life, as a former journalist, as a comms scholar, John H. Johnson had.”
Courtney, when asked to describe this year’s celebration, assures that “it’s going to be educational, culturally enriching and experiential learning as we celebrate a pioneering trailblazer’s life and legacy.
“I hope (attendees) find it enjoyable and that it’s a good day for all.”
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Johnson was born Jan. 19, 1918, to Leroy Johnson and Gertrude Jenkins Johnson. During the devastating flood of 1927, he developed a fascination for news and learning about people, according to the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
After eighth grade, he moved to Chicago and graduated from DuSable High School. He took classes at the University of Chicago and worked part time at Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Co., where he edited the firm’s monthly newspaper. In 1942, he started publishing Negro Digest. The monthly Ebony and weekly Jet soon followed, bringing news of Black culture and personalities into homes across America. Their popularity resulted in Johnson Publishing Co. becoming the largest Black-owned publisher in the world, according to the Arkansas encyclopedia.
Johnson’s publications “gave Black people a sense of pride and worth, particularly at a time in history when Black images were portrayed negatively by mainstream media, if at all,” Courtney says. “In his autobiography, ‘Succeeding Against the Odds,’ he writes (that) to be successful, one must be creative and persistent. He demonstrated his persistence throughout his career by breaking down barriers and overcoming obstacles.”
Moore went to work at Jet in 1980 and describes Johnson as a “no-nonsense, hands-on boss when it came to everything in the publication. Often people would ask me when they learned I worked there if I ever saw Mr. Johnson. My response was, every day! They found that incredible for a man of his stature, running multiple businesses, to be onsite and available in that manner. But that is just who he was.”
In 1996, 50 years after Ebony was first published, Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton. Johnson died on Aug. 8, 2005. Seven years later his image appeared on a U.S. Postal Service stamp. A statue of him by Dumas native Susan Holley Williams was unveiled at John H. Johnson Commemorative Plaza in Arkansas City last year.
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David Montague, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs-student success at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, might be the only person on Friday’s literary panel with a parent who was featured in Jet. His mother, Little Rock native Raye Montague, was an engineer and credited with being the first person to design a naval ship via computer system. She was profiled in a 1986 issue of the magazine with Prince on the cover, says David, who co-authored with Paige Bowers “Overnight Code: The Life of Raye Montague, the Woman Who Revolutionized Naval Engineering.”
Like many Black Americans born in the ’60s, Montague says he grew up with copies of Ebony and Jet in his home.
“The Johnson publications provided a source of information and knowledge that we weren’t getting from typical mainstream news sources … . I literally thought of Ebony and Jet as news sources. At the time I didn’t know they were kind of the outlier. As a family, we had subscriptions to both of those magazines. … They provided images of people who looked like me … who were involved in important things.”
In taking part in Friday’s celebration, he says he sees his role as “an advocate to try to use the life of someone who is such a stellar part of Arkansas history to really help empower the next generation of folks and to keep the legacy going.”
CORRECTION: Colby C. Mitchell, a project manager with Self + Tucker Architects in Memphis, was the presenter on the architecture of the John H. Johnson Cultural and Educational Museum during John H. Johnson Day, scheduled for Friday at the museum, 604 President St. in Arkansas City. The presenter named in an earlier version of this story was incorrect due to an update by event planners after press time.
