The Press: The Brighter Side

“Sure, you can get all hot and bothered about the race question,” says 28-year-old Negro Publisher John H. Johnson. But Publisher Johnson doesn’t intend to. His new magazine, Ebony, out this week, will “mirror the happier side of Negro life.”

Ebony, which imitates LIFE’S format, has an adless first printing of 50,000 copies. On its editor’s theory that “most white magazines deal with Negroes as second-class citizens or freaks,” Ebony wants to show how normal they are. Most of its heroes live in a happy world of ready cash: Eddie Anderson, whose subservient role as Jack Benny’s valet RoChester is anathema to most of the Negro press, is to Ebony just a big success who has a home “like the Taj Mahals of other movie stars.”

Negro authors generally, says Ebony, “are hitting pay dirt,” and the royalties of onetime Communist Richard (Native Son, Black Boy) Wright (pictured with his white wife) “make a pretty fat bankroll.” Ebony prints Gjon Mill’s excellent shots of mixed jam sessions to show how jazz promotes good feeling between whites & blacks, reminds its readers of unpleasantness only with a picture story on Brazil headlined: “Starving Negroes Can’t Eat Racial Equality.” Despite the fact that her show folded before it reached Broadway, Ebony’s 19-year-old pin-up girl Sheila Guys (caption: “A Star Fizzles”) benefits from Johnson’s all-round cheeriness: “Folks back home in Forest, Miss. are betting she’ll turn up again one of these days out in Hollywood.”

Publisher Johnson started the Negro Digest-three years ago with the help of a white executive editor, Ben Burns, 31, who has the same title on Ebony, Negro Digest rode the pocket magazines’ popularity wave to a 110,000 circulation, gave Publisher Johnson enough profits to start Ebony.

*Digest has published some big-name by-liners who were more “hot & bothered about the race question” . . . than its publisher: Marshall Field did a piece for $25, Orson Welles for $15 (both gave away their fees), and Edward G. Robinson for nothing.