before the obama's made the white house black the johsnson's were the first family of black america on the sousthide of chicago.
Eunice W. Johnson, the creator of the Ebony Fashion Fair, a celebrated annual tour of nearly 200 cities that has showcased haute couture and ready-to-wear fashion for a mostly African-American audience for more than 50 years, died on Jan. 3 at her home in Chicago. Mrs. Johnson, who was also one of the first entrepreneurs to market cosmetics made particularly for black women, was 93. Mrs. Johnson, who was also secretary-treasurer of the publishing company, continued to produce and direct the Ebony Fashion Fair through last year.
The cause was renal failure, said Wendy Parks, a spokeswoman for the Johnson Publishing Company, which publishes Ebony and Jet magazines and sponsors the Fashion Fair. Mrs. Johnson, who with her late husband, John H. Johnson, who died in 2005, started and founded the Ebony publishing empire in 1942 with a $500 loan secured by furniture owned by Mr. Johnson’s mother, the Johnsons began publishing Negro Digest, a magazine modeled on Reader’s Digest. Within a year it had a circulation of 50,000. That inspired the couple to start Ebony, a monthly with flashy covers like those of Life magazine. Ebony now has a circulation of 1.25 million. Jet magazine, a weekly, was started in 1951 to highlight news of famous African-Americans; it now has a circulation of 900,000. It was Mrs. Johnson who suggested that the magazine, geared to black readers, be named for the fine-grain dark wood.
What started as a favor to a friend the wife of the former president emeritus at Dillard University in New Orleans — production of a fashion show to raise money for a hospital in New Orleans in 1958 — evolved into a grand traveling tour that has brought the latest creations from designers like Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta and Valentino to runways throughout the United States, Canada and the Caribbean. Notable African-Americans designers who launched their careers on the runways at the ebony fashion fair were Lenora Levon, Quinton de’ Alexander and L’Amour. the ebony fashion fair also featured models Pat Cleveland, Judy Pace and Terri Springer, actor Richard Roundtree, and television journalist Janet Langhart Cohen, wife of former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. According to Johnson Publishing Co., the Ebony Fashion Fair has produced more than 4,000 shows and has raised more than $55 million for civil rights groups, hospitals, community centers and scholarships.
At the 1974 show in Manhattan, Mrs. Johnson drew a roar from the crowd when she stepped onstage during intermission and said that she could “run a fashion show from the audience.” It was not always easy. In the early years, when the chartered bus bearing the dozen or so models and the fashions selected by Mrs. Johnson stopped at gas stations in the segregated South, signs said, “No Blacks in the Ladies Room.”
Resistance also surfaced on renowned runways. “We were the ones who convinced Valentino to use black models in his shows back in the ’60s,” Mrs. Johnson told The New York Times in 2001. “I was in Paris, and I told him: ‘If you can’t find any black models, we’ll get some for you. And if you can’t use them, we’re not going to buy from you anymore.’ That was before he was famous.”
Something else perturbed Mrs. Johnson back then: the chore of mixing makeup colors to enhance the varied skin tones of her models. It gave her the idea of starting, in 1973, Fashion Fair Cosmetics, a prestige line that African-American women could buy, for the first time, in top department stores. Stars like Leontyne Price, Diahann Carroll and Aretha Franklin appeared in the company’s ads. Within three years, the growing popularity of Fashion Fair Cosmetics prompted Revlon to introduce the Polished Ambers line for black skins, Avon to start Shades of Beauty and Max Factor to produce Beautiful Bronzes.
Eunice Walker was born in Selma, Ala., on April 4, 1916, one of four children of Nathaniel and Ethel McAlpine Walker. Her father was a physician, her mother a high school principal. She graduated from Talladega College in Alabama in 1938 with a degree in sociology, and earned a master’s degree in social work from Loyola University in Chicago in 1941, journalism at Northwestern University and interior decorating at the Ray-Vogue School of Design. Mrs. Johnson is survived by her daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, who is chairwoman and chief executive of Johnson Publishing, and a granddaughter. pic and editorial @ nyt
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