Selling a treasure chest of black history
For months, a CHICAGO — stream of visitors curious,
— cultured and deep-pocketed
have slipped into a drab — brick warehouse on the West Side of Chicago. They have been escorted upstairs in a creaky elevator to a windowless room and handed blue gloves to wear.
Then they have lingered for hours or days over the most significant collection of photographs depicting African American life in the 20th century.
In one folder, there is Coretta Scott King, cradling her daughter Bernice from a pew at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral. In another, Billie Holiday stands on a city sidewalk with a cigarette and a faraway expression. One box holds a black-andwhite print of Ray Charles hanging out with a Chicago nightclub owner and playing dominoes, as the typewritten caption noted, “by feel.”
This week, one of the visitors to the warehouse could walk away with it all: the entire photo archive from Ebony and Jet, the iconic sister magazines. The collection of photographs, more than 4 million prints and negatives, is being offered at an auction on Wednesday conducted privately at a law firm downtown.
Word of the auction has stirred fascination as the future of the remarkable collection, a bittersweet reminder of the essential place the magazines once held in black homes, hangs in the balance. Historians, alarmed by the potential sale, say that the collection is full of cultural treasures that should be opened to the public. People close to John H. Johnson, the founder of Ebony and Jet who died in 2005, say he would have eventually wanted it to be available for people to see.
Ebony and Jet were practically part of the décor in African American homes during the civil rights movement and beyond, their pages filled with black musicians, fashion models, playwrights and ordinary people who were mostly ignored by the white press. The photographs had a rare intimacy. African American celebrities allowed the magazines’ photographers an especially close view of their lives, inviting them to witness moments of struggle and joy in funerals and marches, honeymoons and cotillions.
“When we see Martin Luther King in a relaxed state, vacationing with his family, we see the nobility of him but also the humanity of him as an everyday man,” said Deborah Willis, the chairwoman of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, who read the magazines in a beauty shop as a girl growing up in Philadelphia. “That archive is truly a treasure for any of us interested in black visual culture.”
Jet and Ebony have faded along with much of the magazine industry in recent years, as advertising revenue has dropped and audiences have moved online. Johnson Publishing, the company that founded the magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, sold them years ago but held onto the photo archive. In April, Johnson Publishing filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection.
It is the second time in four years that Johnson Publishing has flirted with the idea of a sale of the archive. In 2015, the collection was appraised for $46 million, but an auction was never held.
Even before the bankruptcy filing, the company had decided to sell the archive, said Linda Johnson Rice, the chairwoman of Johnson Publishing and daughter of John Johnson, the founder. “It just needs to be in the hands of a place that can give it the exposure it deserves,” she said. “It’s not right to sit on this for ourselves. It’s not doing that much good.”
The sheer size of the collection means much of it has barely been seen by the public in decades. Few photos have been digitized. It has all been shipped in recent weeks from the Johnson Publishing offices on Michigan Avenue to the warehouse.
The collection is being kept in hundreds of vintage file cabinets, manila folders and gray acid-free boxes, its contents largely a mystery to the public. Names and subjects printed on the outside of boxes hint at the range of the images, from “Easter Parade” to “Furs — Ethiopian” to “Harlem Dance Theater.”
Few people know the collection better than Vickie Wilson, an archivist for Johnson Publishing, who has kept meticulous watch over it for nearly 24 years.
“If people ask if we have a photograph, I can probably say yes or no,” Wilson said, walking through the hallways of the warehouse. “You’ll find gems as you go through them. It’s a lot of history.”
In the years when Ebony and Jet were in wide circulation, the cabinets containing photographs were kept locked, even during the day. Editors were rarely allowed to remove a photo from a cabinet for long, Wilson said.
John Johnson, the visionary founder of the company, would often grant requests from scholars who wished to see certain photos from the archive, but not always.
Art historians said they were both thrilled and nervous as the auction approached.
“It keeps me up at night, thinking about the future of this archive,” said Tiffany M. Gill, associate professor of Africana studies and history at the University of Delaware. “You can’t really tell the story of black life in the 20th century without these images from the Johnson archive. So it’s important that whatever happens in this auction, that these images are preserved and made available to scholars, art lovers and everyday folks.”
Several museums have expressed interest, and the obvious candidates that might be among the bidders are the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library; the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington; and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Another possibility that is feared by scholars: A private collector buys the archive and stashes it away.
That would offend the magazines’ creator, who founded Johnson Publishing in 1942 using a $500 loan he had secured against his mother’s furniture.
“It’s hard to put myself in his shoes,” said his daughter, Rice. “He would want the public to have access to it.”
Margena Christian, a former senior editor at Ebony who left the magazine in 2014, said John Johnson cared deeply about photography, signing off on every story and every page.
“Mr. Johnson, as we called him, always said, ‘I am not for sale,’” Christian said. “And the real tragedy is that his building was for sale, his magazines were for sale, and now his archives are for sale. I can’t say on record what he would say about it, because it would be a lot of expletives. He would curse and curse and curse.”