Moving Beyond Saints and Martyrs: Post-World War II Black Capitalists and Their Civil Rights Work

“I wasn’t trying to make history, I was trying to make money” (1). John Johnson offered this explanation for why, in 1945, he launched the black lifestyle magazine EBONY, closely modeled after the popular LIFE magazine. EBONYdid make history, however. Overnight, it became the most successful black publication in the world, changed black commercial publishing, and became a significance cultural influence in U.S. culture. As a black entrepreneur, then, Johnson has a secured place in the narrative of black business and marketing history. But what, if any place does he deserve in the history of how African Americans achieved their civil rights?

In the popular civil rights story, black capitalists have no place—as if their market-driven motives might taint the saints and martyrs that populate that narrative. In the historiography, however, they have begun to appear, primarily as behind-the-scene business owners financing the cause.

What happens when we consider how black capitalists contributed to the civil rights struggle beyond performing as examples of black success or funding the "true" activists? This paper dramatizes this question by using Johnson and other black marketing men to trace how black entrepreneurialism intersected with civil rights politics. I argue that capitalists like Johnson performed non-activist work that cannot be detangled from how civil rights activism progressed in the post-World War II era. I detail how these capitalists manufactured, distributed, and popularized conceptions of American freedom and blackness that both defined a “prize” worth eyeing and instructed  protest strategies of visible black civil rights activists. Through these black capitalists, I consider civil rights activity that was not necessarily grassroots, progressive, explicitly political or even effective.

¹ John H. Johnson with Lerone Bennett, Jr., Succeeding Against the Odds: The Inspiring Autobiography of One of America’s Wealthiest Entrepreneurs (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 156.