San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ebony volume covers 75 years of Black history
That fall of 1984, the backpack was hidden under my coat in the school’s cloakroom. My family received our monthly copy of Ebony magazine before any other home in my Baltimore neighborhood. So, during my teacher’s all too frequent bathroom breaks, I grabbed the copy from my backpack and stood with my classmates, slowly flipping the pages, their breaths hot on my neck, their elbows nudging into mine.
I’d just had the highlight of my middle school career — scrapping with the neighborhood bully on the school blacktop. By all accounts, I won the fight. Though my mother was still threatening me with the disposal of my mixtapes, I was more interested in maintaining the popularity I’d earned from the beatdown. And the November 1984 Ebony issue was the key.
That year, we were deep into the Prince vs. M.J. battle, so when I brought out the November copy, featuring Prince in a frilly white jumpsuit with a poof of black hair peeking from the opening at his chest, the Prince fans in my class nearly canonized me. The next month, still on my winning streak, I held what I believed to be the preeminent issue of the year — Michael Jackson in full sailor regalia, wearing his white glove, with those big doe eyes shooting an arrow straight into my 13yearold heart.
In a beautiful curation, “Ebony: Covering Black America,” Lavaille Lavette takes us through 75 years of this groundbreaking magazine. In the opening pages of the collection, Lavette reminds us that Ebony’s founder, John H. Johnson, “set out to create a magazine for Black America” that would rival the “trailblazing Life magazine.” As you glimpse the pages of this compilation, you’ll see that Johnson very much succeeded.
In recent years, frankly, I hadn’t thought much about the impact of Ebony. I’d long forgotten what life was like before the dawn of the internet, when I was still hungry for fetching photos and balanced stories of people who looked like me. As I perused the pages of this commemoration, I found myself delighting in the remembrances of how I, and so many others, had been formed and informed by those pages. Every colorful leaf in this tribute to Ebony is a reflection not just of Black American life, but also of American life. “Biggest Protest March in History” was the cover of the November 1963 issue; “The White Problem in America” read the cover of August 1965; and the August 1970 issue met us with the question: “Which Way Black America? Separation? Integration? Liberation?” Ebony investigated what mainstream media would take a generation to view as vital to America’s interests.
For me, the red rectangular block, at the top left of the magazine covers, symbolized a celebration. Each month, when the mailman shoved our copy into the metal mailbox, it seemed collectively we had all arrived. “Black is beautiful!” Johnson hoped we’d believe, and the lens with which Ebony photographed Black bodies was a mighty reflection not only of this sentiment but also of Ebony’s belief that we were enough.
Of course, this is what I tried but failed to explain to my mother when she finally realized I’d scissored Michael’s photo out of the December issue and taped it to my bedroom wall. Back then, we showed the value of an Ebony cover by curating it as art. My mother didn’t understand this, but Lavette, president and publisher of Ebony’s imprint, Ebony Publishing, says that “Ebony was Black America’s social media long before the birth of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram … it was everywhere we were … literally part of our families.”
Lavette’s book offers a rare glimpse of more than 600 color covers from 1945 to 2020. Finding them all at the end of the collection was deeply pleasurable, for the covers are, indeed, stories themselves. There is a fistpumping Nelson Mandela, the Rev. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King holding hands, a photo of Mary McLeod Bethune, standing before the Capitol, wearing a black fur coat with a shock of elegant white hair, and on several covers from the 1960s through the 1980s, the man I believed was behind my mother’s initial desire for a subscription — Mr. Sidney
Poitier, himself. But the cover that brought me to tears was our one and only Whitney, holding Bobby Christina, her mother’s pride so evident in a smile that offered no hint of what was to come.
Lavette says she selected many featured covers from friends and acquaintances she surveyed. “I wanted everyday people to tell me which covers were important to them,” she says. The volume also includes words from celebrities like Venus Williams, Sean Combs and Gabrielle Union, none of whom perfectly captures the wonder that is Ebony, but all of whom reminded me that each of us desired different things when we sat down with our monthly copies. Some of us sought affirmation and information, while others looked for hope and inspiration. And Ebony delivered all of it —glamour, fashion, book smarts, street smarts, coolness, heft and elegance. Lavette’s collection reminds us that for 75 years and counting, Ebony magazine has managed to give us to us.