Links Roundup 12.13.12
In early November, Ebony.com introduced The Ebony Collection, an online shop that sells framed prints of 2,000 photos selected from the magazine’s million-image archive. Reprinted from the original negatives stored in a climate-controlled room, the images were selected by Ms. Johnson Rice, who spent months poring over her father’s original commissions. “We kept everything,” Ms. Johnson Rice said. “Every major event that’s happened to African-Americans since 1945, with Ebony as a repository for all those photographs and as a voice for all that happened.” Paying respect to history is a theme repeatedly invoked in the Johnson Publishing offices, so much so that it was no surprise running into Henry Louis Gates Jr., the director of the Harvard W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, in a conference room. Professor Gates was there with a film crew shooting a PBS series, “Many Rivers to Cross: The History of the African American People,” and was being shown images from the archives by Ms. Johnson Rice for an episode that will cover 1940 to 1980. “My family got Ebony,” he said later. “Every family subscribed to Ebony and Jet if they were black. “They still have cultural resonance among all classes of African-Americans,” Professor Gates said. “Very few organs of journalism reach a wider swath of the African-American community than Ebony and Jet.”
Ravi Perry and Paris Prince appeared in the Dec. 10 issue, which announced the couple’s August wedding in Massachusetts, the first state in the country to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. “President Obama has evolved [on marriage equality], and now we can add JET magazine to that,” Prince said on MSNBC Tuesday morning. He and Perry spoke with Thomas Roberts about the historic moment in the magazine’s history just as the Supreme Court announced its decision to take on two same-sex marriage cases next year. “The Supreme Court has had a history of equality cases before its docket and they’ve sometimes erred on the side of caution and has embarrassed the country,” Perry said, “but they’ve also done the right thing when it comes to equality…so we’re hopeful they’ll do the right thing again with the marriage equality cases that they’ve taken up.”
- On Cory Booker And Poverty’s Psychic Costs (Postbourgie)
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