Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (American Music Series)

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Black Digest was changed to Negro Digest before its first publication, and then eventually to Black World. In 1945, Johnson used the slight momentum and trust he had gained to start Ebony magazine, which took off, regularly selling out of its 25,000-copy run. What Johnson knew was simple: when these magazines took off, black people not only wanted to see positive images of themselves, they needed to see positive images of themselves. It was the right magazine at the right time. Many living black people in the early to mid-1940s were like Johnson and his family: children and grandchildren of slaves. The historical impacts of slavery were still echoing far and wide throughout parts of the country, particularly in the southern states. Ebony, in its initial stages, offered full-color photos of successful black people, along with photo essays and glamorous ads with black people in them. It wasn’t a magazine that could save the world or any black people in it, but it did offer a small glimpse into a better possibility—a window of some dreams being fulfilled in a place that might not be your place, but a place where someone who looks like you is living a little better, and you could live through them.