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.

Johnson, who died January 3 at 93, 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 expand 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 and on cosmetics that enhanced the varied skin shades of African Americans.

In that regard, Eunice Walker Johnson 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. The 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 tens of millions for social causes and institutions, was intimately connected to the broader dynamic of advancement of black Americans then transforming American society.

Harold Koda, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, of New York, said earlier this week that Eunice Johnson had “upend(ed) prior definitions of beauty and self-worth … and blew open the narrow confines of what constituted prevailing traditional American standards of aesthetics. Through her ambitious world-view,” he added, “the ostensibly trivial world of fashion became a tool of empowerment, and … fashion became an inspired mechanism for equal rights.”

Linda Johnson Rice, chairman and chief executive of Johnson Publishing, also spoke briefly, describing her mother as “a champion (who) … paved the road for many African-American models and whose driving force was to help black women recognize their own beauty and be proud of their heritage.

Koda and Rice spoke at a small luncheon held in Johnson’s honor Monday at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In fact, planning for the luncheon tribute at the country’s premier art museum had begun last year, with the expectation that Johnson, who kept working nearly to the last weeks of her life, would be there, too. The presence of those in attendance from the fields of business and politics as well as fashion and art bore eloquent witness to the scope of her achievements. President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama sent a letter of tribute via White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, a close friend of the Johnson family. New York Governor David A. Paterson and New York City Mayor R. Bloomberg also sent messages of tribute.

So, too, was Former President Bill Clinton, another close family friend.

“The Johnson family has given a lot to our country,” he reminded the audience, “and an enormous amount to change the way African Americans think about themselves, see themselves and the way the rest of America sees them. The cosmetics issue may seem frivolous to people who’ve never been on the short end of what it was like before, (but) it makes a statement that goes way beyond the time it takes to put the makeup on. ”

As President Clinton and the luncheon’s other speakers made clear, Eunice Johnson 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: she envisioned the runways of the Ebony Fashion Fair as part of the pathway to a better future black women and men were forging.