Johnson Publishing Company Archive

This archive documents the activities of the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC), including business records, ephemera, audiovisual materials, and printed copies of JPC magazine titles such as Ebony, Jet, Tan, Confessions, Hue, Black Stars, and Negro Digest. At the heart of the collection are over 4 million prints, negatives, slides, and transparencies depicting iconic Black actors, musicians, fashion models, writers, leaders, and activists, as well as everyday citizens. The archive provides critical visual documentation of the 20th-century Black experience in America, including images taken by David Jackson of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi; and Moneta Sleet Jr.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Coretta Scott King at the funeral of her slain husband, Martin Luther King Jr.

Getty has committed an initial investment of $30 million to support conserving, cataloging, and digitizing the collection so that it can be made available for public access and research. The collection, currently housed in Chicago, is not available to the public at this time as the archival staff is unable to facilitate access and research while it is processed. A team of experts, led jointly by Getty and NMAAHC, will complete this work collaboratively over seven years (2022–2029). As material is cataloged and digitized, it will be moved in phases into the physical care of NMAAHC in Washington, DC.

The Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) was founded in Chicago in 1942 by John H. Johnson with a $500 loan, using his mother's furniture as collateral. Its first title, Negro Digest, appeared later that year, followed by its flagship publications Ebony in 1945 and Jet in 1951. During its peak from the 1960s until the early 2000s, JPC was the largest Black-owned company in the United States. In 2019, the changing media landscape prompted JPC to file for liquidation and the company’s archive was purchased jointly by the Smithsonian, Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and J. Paul Getty Trust, with the Getty Research Institute and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) sharing stewardship responsibilities.

The archive is co-owned by NMAAHC and the J. Paul Getty Trust and is currently being cataloged and digitized for eventual public access.