The archives contain historic images chronicling African American history from the 1940s to the early 2000s, including the open casket photo of lynched teenager Emmett Till in 1955 and a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife and daughter at his funeral. The company sold off Ebony and Jet the following year, and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation in April. At the time, they were appraised at $46 million. But Johnson died in 2005, and the company has struggled for at least a decade, first attempting to sell its archives back in 2015.
Johnson and once the country’s largest African American-owned publishing firm, Johnson Publishing launched Ebony magazine in 1945 and its sister publication Jet in 1951. after his birth in 1956.įounded in 1942 by John H. Thurgood and Cecilia Marshall with their son Thurgood Marshall Jr. “I think we cannot even fully measure what it is going to mean to have these images available,” Alexander told the Times. After they brought on two more foundations and gained approval from their respective boards, they cast the winning bid. We felt it was imperative to preserve these images, to give them the exposure they deserve and make them readily available to the public.”Īccording to the New York Times, the consortium came together just last week after Walker and Elizabeth Alexander of the Mellon Foundation learned of the impending auction and rapidly emailed one another to hatch a plan. “This archive is a national treasure and one of tremendous importance to the telling of black history in America. “We’re thrilled with the outcome,” Ford Foundation president Darren Walker said in a statement. The valuable archive was being sold as part of the company’s bankruptcy proceeding. The foundations, which came together to buy the archive in just a week to keep it from disappearing into private hands, plan to donate it to the National Museum of African American History of Culture in Washington, DC the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and other cultural institutions.Ī purchase agreement was filed late Wednesday and the sale is scheduled to close on Friday, pending court approval, reports the Chicago Tribune. Containing more than four million images and 10,000 hours of video and audio recordings, the archive is considered an irreplaceable record of 20th-century African American life and culture. Paul Getty Trust, and the MacArthur Foundation-has bought the historic archives of Johnson Publishing, the Chicago-based company behind Ebony and Jet magazines, for $30 million. A consortium of foundations-the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the J.
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