A House for the Struggle by E. James West

Author:E. James West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ARCHITECTURE / Buildings / General
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2022-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

A Crossroads of the World

While most of the people who passed through the Defender and Johnson Publishing offices hailed from the continental United States, many came from further afield. For foreign students or journalists visiting Chicago on cultural exchanges or writing assignments, the Black press buildings on Michigan Avenue provided a popular attraction; Ebony reported that its headquarters was frequented by “students from Norway and Sweden, photographers from Germany and newspapermen from Damascus.”147 More broadly, the location of the Defender and Johnson Publishing plants appealed to curious international tourists as sites that offered a window into Black Chicago life without having to stray too far from the city’s downtown district or risk venturing into the “other Chicago” contained on the South Side.148 Just a few years after the opening of its Michigan Avenue plant, Ebony announced that its headquarters had been visited by citizens of at least thirty foreign countries. By its tenth anniversary, the magazine declared that its publishing offices had become a “crossroads of the world” and that groups of overseas visitors were being “constantly escorted through the building.”149

The growing number of international visitors to the Johnson Publishing headquarters reflected the increasingly global audience of the company’s magazines. This was most clearly traceable through Ebony, which quickly gained a significant foreign circulation after its introduction in 1945. Beginning with just its second issue, the magazine regularly published letters from international readers who expressed “profound pleasure to learn that a Negro magazine such as Ebony has been presented to the world.”150 For foreign readers of all races, the periodical provided a valuable insight into the African American experience, one that was often difficult to attain through mainstream American periodicals. As food editor Freda DeKnight noted following a culinary tour of Europe during the early 1950s, “Native Europeans … depend upon Ebony to give them an honest, well-illustrated picture of Negro life in America.”151 Interest was highest within the Black diaspora, with readers in Africa and the Caribbean clamoring to get their hands on the publication. Returning from a 1956 trip to Liberia, Black sociologist St. Clair Drake called the Johnson Publishing offices to inform its staff that every copy “seemed to increase in value as it grew older and more dog-eared.”152

Ebony’s international popularity, as well as the appeal of the magazine’s Chicago headquarters to foreign tourists, was linked to its growing coverage of Black life beyond the United States. As the magazine’s editors boasted, visitors from “South Africa, Brazil, Liberia and other far-flung spots come not just because they have heard about our beautiful building but because they have been pleased and impressed with what they have read in our publications.”153 Era Bell Thompson, who would go on to become Ebony’s first international editor, was just one contributor who conducted extensive overseas research trips for articles and special series. In 1953 Thompson embarked on a four-month-long research trip through more than fifteen African nations, collecting a wealth of material for Ebony stories and for her book-length work, Africa, Land of my Fathers, which was published by Doubleday the following year.

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