By The Editors

Eunice Johnson, who created the Ebony Fashion Fair in the mid-1950s and built it into a powerful social and financial success, was clairvoyant.

She saw, at a time when the worldwide fashion industry refused to, that black American women had a sense of beauty, grace and style and wanted to participate in the new fashion explosion that was just beginning to explode beyond the narrow confines of haute couture. She also understood, even then when black Americans still endured pervasive discrimination, that black women would draw down sufficient economic benefit from America’s booming economy of the 1950s and 1960s to join the country’s expanding consumer society. In short, they were prepared to spend on fashion.

In that regard, Eunice Walker Johnson, who died January 3, was as much a pioneer of modern black America as her husband, the late John H. Johnson, head of the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company whose stable of magazines they founded in the 1940s – Ebony (whose name Eunice Johnson suggested), Jet, and Negro Digest (later, Black World) – became a cornerstone of black America’s postwar success. Her focus on fashion did not obscure the clear undertone that the Ebony Fashion Fair, which raised millions for social causes and institutions, was intimately connected to the broader dynamic of advancement of black Americans then transforming American society. She helped to spread the institutionalization of black striving and of black success in fields beyond the few to which blacks had been confined. Even in its early years, it was clear that the designs Eunice Johnson had in mind encompassed far more than just clothing, and that she envisioned the runways of the Ebony Fashion Fair as part of the pathway to a better future that black women and men were forging.