November 1

On November 1, 1951, Jet magazine was first published by  by John H. Johnson of the Johnson Publishing Company. Initially billed as "The Weekly Negro News Magazine", Jet is notable for its role in chronicling the American Civil Rights movement from its earliest years, including coverage of the Emmett Till murder, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Martin Luther King, Jr. It also covered fashion and beauty tips, entertainment news, and politics, and included reader submissions for "Jet Beauty of the Week", weddings, and anniversaries. The final print issue was June 23, 2014, and in a blog entry about this event poet J. Ivy wrote, "From news, to the arts, to politics, to beauty, to fashion, to music, to writers, to entertainment, to sports, to love you broke stories, told stories from our perspective and forever jetted into our hearts. To John H. Johnson, the Johnson Publishing and JET Family, we love you. We thank you! Cheers to the next chapter! See you online... J. Ivy".

First Jet Magazine Cover, November 1, 1951

Birthdays

Caroline Still Anderson (November 1, 1848 - June 1 or 2, 1919), the daughter of abolitionist William Still, graduated from Oberlin College at age 19, the youngest in her class and the only African American. She returned to Philadelphia and taught elocution, drawing, and music until she entered medical school. graduating from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania on 1878 and interning at Boston's New England Women's and Children's Hospital. She opened a medical practice in Philadelphia and soon married married Matthew Anderson, a Doctor of Divinity and founder of Philadelphia’s Berean Presbyterian Church. She operated a dispensary in the church, and the couple founded the Berean Manual Training and Industrial School where she served as Assistant Princpal and also taught elocution, physiology, and hygiene.  At the beginning of the 20th Century she worked to establish Philadelphia’s first black Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).

Sippie Wallace (November 1, 1898 – November 1, 1996) built a solid reputation as a blues singer in Houston before joining her brother George in Chicago where she landed a recording contract with Okeh Records in 1923. By the late 1930s she left show business to become a church organist, singer, and choir director at Leland Baptist Church in Detroit and rarely performed secular music until she was persuaded to join long-time friend Victoria Spivey on the folk and blues festival circuit. Wallace recorded two albums in 1966, Women Be Wise and Singing the Blues, as well as later recording with Spivey, Louis Armstrong, and Bonnie Raitt, with whom she toured in the 1970s and 1980s.

Margaret Taylor-Burroughs (November 1, 1915 – November 21, 2010) was a co-founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History. She also helped to establish the South Side Community Art Center, whose opening on May 1, 1941 was dedicated by the First Lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt. At the age of 25 Burroughs served as the youngest member of its board of directors. She was a prolific writer, with her efforts directed toward the exploration of the Black experience and to children, especially to their appreciation of their cultural identity and to their introduction and growing awareness of art. She is also credited with the founding of Chicago's Lake Meadows Art Fair in the early 1950s.

Miriam DeCosta Willis (born November 1, 1934; Florence) received a BA degree, Phi Beta Kappa, from Wellesley College, as well as MA and PhD degrees from Johns Hopkins University. She became the first African American faculty member at Memphis State University in 1966 and chaired the Department of Romance Languages at Howard University. Co-founder of the Memphis Black Writers' Workshop, DeCosta-Willis has published eight books, including Blacks in Hispanic Literature, Erotique Noire, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, and Daughters of the Diaspora.

Nancy Hicks Maynard (November 1, 1946 - September 21, 2008) became the first female African American reporter at the New York Times in 1969, at first covering race-related topics and later writing for the paper's education and science news departments, primarily on health-care coverage. In 1977 she and her husband, Washington Post reporter Robert C. Maynard, moved to Oakland where they founded the Institute for Journalism Education to prepare minority students for careers in news editing, newsroom management, and other careers in journalism. The couple bought the Oakland Tribune in 1983, making it the first and, at the time of Mrs. Maynard's death, the only major metropolitan daily newspaper to be owned by African Americans.

Rear Admiral Barry C. Black, USN (Ret.) (born November 1, 1948) has been chaplain of the U.S. Senate since 2003, the first African American and the first Seventh-Day Adventist to hold this office. He had served for over 27 years as a chaplain in the United States Navy, rising to the rank of rear admiral and ending his career as the chief of chaplains of the United States Navy, and chief of the United States Navy Chaplain Corps.  During the 16-day United States federal government shutdown of 2013, his invocations began to garner widespread national attention. In addition to earning three separate Master of Arts degrees in: divinity, counseling, and management; he also holds two earned doctorates: a Doctorate of Ministry and a Ph.D. in psychology.

Events

On November 1, 1901, Grambling State University opened on November 1, 1901 as the Colored Industrial and Agricultural School. It was founded by the North Louisiana Colored Agriculture Relief Association, a group of African American farmers who wanted to organize and operate a school for African Americans in their region of the state. In response to the Association’s request for assistance, Tuskegee Institute’s Booker T. Washington sent Charles P. Adams, to aid the group in organizing an industrial school, became its founder and first president. The university is home of College Football Hall of Fame inductee and former head football coach Eddie Robinson, and is listed on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

November 1, 1910 was the publication date of the first issue of NAACP's Crisis Magazine. W.E.B. Du Bois was the first editor, a position he held until 1934 when he left for editorial and financial reasons. The magazine was the premier monthly showcase of Harlem Renaissance writing and artwork, and is still in publication today. As the founding editor of The Crisis, Du Bois proclaimed his intentions in his first editorial: "The object of this publication is to set forth those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people. It takes its name from the fact that the editors believe that this is a critical time in the history of the advancement of men."

In November 1942 John H. Johnson launched his first publication, Negro Digest, a monthly magazine similar in format and content to Readers' Digest but aimed at an African American readership. He financed the venture by soliciting two-dollar prepaid subscriptions from a mailing list of Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company policy holders where he worked at the time. The magazine ceased publication in late 1951, due in part to competition from Johnson/s other magazines, Ebony and the newly-created Jet. It was revived in the mid-sixties with more contemporary content and a name change to Your Black World in 1970 but was not profitable and folded in 1976.

In November 1945 Ebony magazine was founded by Johnson Publishing Company, owned by John H. Johnson. Showcasing African American celebrities "from Harlem to Hollywood", current events, and upbeat topics in a large, glossy format it was an immediate success and is still in publication today although it was sold to the Clear View Group in 2016, and the new publisher is known as Ebony Media Corporation. The 65th anniversary featured eight covers recreating past editions with contemporary models, such as the pairing of Mahalia Jackson and Yolanda Adams shown here. All issues from November 1959 to December 2008 are available online free through Google Book Search.

Yolanda Adams as Mahalia Jackson

Photo Gallery

Crystal L. Windham, Director of General Motors North American
Passenger Car Design as of November 1, 2008

 Publications

Billy Eckstine and wife June Eckstine At Home - Jet Magazine November 1, 1951

Dorothy Dandridge’s groundbreaking Life magazine cover from November 1, 1954.

Black Ice: The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, 1895-1925. by Fosty George. $7.03. Author: Darril Fosty. 264 pages. Publisher: Stryker-Indigo Publishing Company Inc., New York, NY. (November 1, 2004)

Howard L. Bingham's Black Panthers 1968 by Steve Crist. $18.53. 192 pages. Publication: November 1, 2010. Publisher: Ammo Books; Popular Edition edition (November 1, 2010)

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