Getty and Smithsonian Acquire Ebony and Jet Photo Archives for $30M

The archives of Ebony and Jet magazines, published by Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago since 1942, have been acquired for $30 million by a consortium including the Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution. The collection, now owned by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and the Getty Research Institute, contains 3 million photographic negatives and slides, 983,000 photographs, 166,000 contact sheets, and 9,000 audio and video recordings. It will be digitized and studied by the Getty Research Institute in partnership with the NMAAHC. A team led by Steven D. Booth of The Blackivist will oversee preservation. NMAAHC director Kevin Young stated that the archive will be accessible to students and visitors, not just researchers, with plans to digitize 80,000 to 90,000 images within the next year. A fall exhibition on Black music featuring Aretha Franklin and Prince is already planned. The magazines were pivotal in documenting civil rights activists like Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall, as well as entertainers such as Whoopi Goldberg and Billie Holiday. LeRonn P. Brooks, associate curator at the Getty Research Institute, called the staff photographers 'some of the best in the world.' The Johnson Publishing Company closed in 2016 and declared bankruptcy three years later.