Greater Boston this week brought up the reasonable question of why John Johnson’s passing received so little notice, when the magazines he created and published - Jet and Ebony - were far more influential in America’s cultural landscape than Peter Jennings’ anchoring was. The revolution took place on two fronts. Socially the magazines gave voice to a new black bourgeoisie that was both integrationist (in the sense that its consumerist and society-page lifestyle journalism was parallel to the white bourgeoisie’s) and distinct in its anti-assimilationist ethos. Economically, they provided a new industrial model for media to begin to appreciate the consumer power of blacks and other minorities. And as Dan Kennedy pointed out, their role in publicizing the Emmett Till lynching brought the first modern media consciousness of the awakening Second Reconstruction.
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