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room, to the two fully plumbed bars, to sliding room dividers that disappear into walls. At Eunice Johnson’s dinner table, glasses are of the heaviest crystal, tableware is of the heaviest silver, the coffee cups are of the thinnest Limoges, and the napkins are of the heaviest damask. And yet, for all the luxury that surrounds her, Eunice Johnson is able to view her circumstances with a certain humor. Showing a photograph of herself chatting with Marc Chagall, she says, “When I first met him at the White House—” and then breaks off with a laugh. “Listen to me,” she says. “Listen to me saying, ‘When I met him at the White House’!”
    Eunice Walker Johnson, whom John Johnson married in 1941, is also from a small town in Arkansas, but comes from a very different sort of background. Along with her considerably lighter skin, straight hair, and what blacks call “nice white looks,” she is also of good family. Though she did not attend Palmer, she is very much the “Palmer type.” She graduated from fashionable Talladega College and, in fact, her maternal grandfather, William H. McAlpine, founded Talladega, which was originally established as a school for Baptist ministers. Grandpa McAlpine was a close friend of Booker T. Washington’s. At Talladega, Eunice Walker was properly a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha and, after college, she went on to get amaster’s degree at Loyola University. Her father’s father was a property owner in Alabama and, though far from rich, the Walkers had been comfortably off for some time, and were a far cry from the abject poverty in which John Johnson grew up. Eunice’s father was a physician, and her mother was principal of the local high school. Two of her brothers are also medical doctors, and her sister is a Ph.D. For John Johnson, marrying Eunice was a distinct move upward in the black social scale, and for Eunice, her marriage to John Johnson was also considered a “catch,” since by 1941 he was already a young man whose star was visibly on the rise.
    John Johnson also gives his mother full credit for his share in his success. “She pushed me all the way,” he says. “For a long time, I never even knew that fathers were necessary. We were poor, we were sharecroppers, and there was never enough money to pay the boss man, but it was a wonderful, happy childhood.” He is more casual about attributing success to prayer and the Lord, however, and thinks that his own inventiveness as a salesman was a major factor. In the beginning, there was resistance on the part of distributors and news dealers against placing Negro Digest on newsstands. It wouldn’t sell, they claimed, and “Negroes don’t buy magazines.” To overcome this attitude, Johnson got on the telephone and spent days telephoning news dealers, in variously disguised voices, and asking, “Do you have the new issue of Negro Digest? You don’t? Can you tell me where I can find it?” The little ploy worked, and dealers began placing orders. And the magazine did sell. Today, renamed Black World , and devoted largely to black literary matters, the magazine has a monthly circulation of over 50,000. “I’m often asked when Negro Digest first became successful,” Johnson says, “and I say that it was with the first issue. It had to be, or there’d never have been a second issue.”
    Three years later, he was ready for a much more ambitious undertaking—a big, slick-paper picture magazine to be called Ebony , which was to be in size, appearance, and format an unabashed imitation of Life , which was then the giant of white American weeklies. When he was accused of trying to ape the white man’s Life , Johnson shrugged off the criticism, saying that this was precisely his intention—just as Newsweek , in the beginning, had imitated Time. Ebony was to be the Life for black people, and the chief