The Ambitious Plan to Open Up a Treasure Trove of Black History
Check in on the progress of the seven-year project to digitize the Johnson Publishing Company archive
Steven Booth stands in the Chicago warehouse where the Johnson Publishing Company archive is currently being stored and cataloged.
Body Content
Rows upon rows of ordinary-looking boxes, stacked high and surrounded by fencing, fill an unassuming warehouse in Chicago.
But what’s inside these boxes is anything but ordinary. Photographs of Ray Charles taking business calls, Louis Armstrong celebrating his birthday, Maya Angelou lounging on her bed, and millions more intimate and striking images of Black celebrities and everyday life are tucked away in the vast Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) archive.
“Once you start reading the names on the boxes, then you say ‘Ohhh…’ To me, that’s exciting,” said Vickie Wilson, who was the publishing company’s archival specialist for 20 years and is now consulting with Getty on the project to archive and digitize these materials and make them available to the public.
As the head of five companies, executive Ray Charles conducts business in his office suite located on the top floor of a two-story building in Los Angeles, 1974. Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Photo: Ted Williams
The Johnson Publishing Company produced iconic magazines including Ebony and Jet and its archive is regarded as one of the most significant collections of 20th century Black American culture. The archive contains around 5,000 magazines, 200 boxes of business records, 10,000 audio and visual recordings, and 4.5 million prints and negatives that chronicle Black life from the 1940s until the present day—not only preeminent figures like Muhammed Ali and Aretha Franklin, but also scenes of ordinary life like high school graduations and vacations, which weren’t often documented or celebrated in other publications.
After the publishing company filed for bankruptcy in 2019, a consortium comprising five institutions including the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Smithsonian Institution purchased the archive. Getty committed $30 million in support of the processing and digitization of the archive, which will make the collection available to scholars, journalists, and the general public like it never has before.
Last year, ownership of the archive was officially transferred to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and Getty. Since then, the two institutions have been laying important groundwork so that this fall, the monumental task of digitizing the entire archive, making it available it to a brand-new website, and moving the materials to their new home in Washington, DC, can truly begin.
To put the magnitude of the project into perspective, imagine that you have to round up all your own family’s (printed) photos for an album or video. How much work would that take?
“Now triple that and multiply by like a million,” said Kara Olidge, associate director for collections and discovery at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), which is co-leading the project for Getty along with Getty’s digital team.
Maya Angelou relaxes in her room before performing at New York's Village Vanguard, undated. Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Photo: G. Marshall Wilson
The archive in process
Despite delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, NMAAHC and Getty have been busy with foundational tasks: hiring staff, designating each institution’s role in each task, and planning the process for archiving and digitizing each piece of material. The GRI is taking the lead on archival processing in Chicago, while Getty and the Smithsonian co-developed the technical architecture, with the Smithsonian managing the mass digitization and storage in Washington, DC, and Getty managing metadata systems and developing the website.
“In general, both institutions can do this easily without the other. But what makes this a really unique and dynamic experience is that we’re relying on each other’s strengths,” said Steven Booth, the GRI’s JPC archive manager.
Booth recently completed a pilot program to determine the process for cataloging each folder in the collection in Chicago and sending it to Washington, DC, for digitization. Any damaged or unstable materials will receive conservation treatment in Chicago as well, though Booth said the collection as a whole is in great shape.
JPC archives assistant Jehoiada Calvin sorting through cartons of color slides attributed to Johnson Publishing Company staff photographer Moneta Sleet, Jr.
The digital plans are ambitious. They include a website accessible to the public and to researchers, incorporating digital asset management and data management systems that Getty and the Smithsonian already use, and robust metadata to make the collection useful to everyone.
Louis Armstrong celebrating his birthday, 1970. Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Photo: Moneta Sleet, Jr.
Up next for the archive
This fall, Booth and his team of seven archivists will begin cataloging the collection and sending it to the Smithsonian’s storage facility in batches of a few thousand images at a time. A Smithsonian team will take the images, digitize them, and make them available online. Getty will use those images and the metadata created by the archivists to build a website that enables access to the collection, and aims to augment it using computer vision to provide enhanced searchability over time. Once there’s a critical mass of material, the site will be made public and then those eager to see the JPC collection can look forward to periodic additions of images to the website for about the next five years.
After that, the Smithsonian will be the official stewards of the physical archive in Washington, DC, though the archive will remain available to Getty (and other interested institutions) for research and exhibition.
Meanwhile, both institutions will engage in outreach efforts to expose new audiences to the JPC archive. Starting in July 2023, the two institutions are organizing a series of workshops aimed at introducing undergraduate students from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to conservation as a potential career path, using the JPC archive to teach principles of photographs conservation. The 2023 workshop will be hosted at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University.
Dr. Mae C. Jemison at NASA training facility, 1988. Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Photo: Michael Cheers Jr.
For Wilson, it feels like Getty and the Smithsonian are giving the archive a second lease on life. After the company’s bankruptcy, the archive was in limbo.
“I was just glad that somebody got the archive who could share it and people will still get to use it—and now they will get to access it for free,” Wilson said. “I think it’s in good hands and they’re trying to get it out, but this is just going to be a process.”
That process will be a long one, the team admits. But once the archive is digitized, the real discovery can begin. Website visitors will be able to download millions of images, including many that were never published. Wilson, Olidge, and Booth are all eager to discover how people use this resource, from artistic inspiration to history lessons to writing book reports.
For Olidge, the archive’s digitization comes at a pivotal time. In the last year, many states have introduced legislation that restricts what schools can teach about race and other U.S. history.
“Collections like the Johnson Publishing Company archive are going to be crucial to the 21st century because this is the battle that we’re facing right now,” Olidge said. “And I think that’s a driver for why people are so desperate to have access to it.”
