The Man from Essence: Creating a Magazine for Black Women - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Edward Lewis, propelled by the extraordinary success of Essence magazine, has become one of the most successful and respected magazine publishers in the country. In 1969, he cofounded Essence and later founded Latina magazine. Mr. Lewis was honored with the Henry Johnson Fisher Lifetime Achievement Award, the Time, Inc. Henry Luce Award, and was a 2014 inductee into the Advertising Hall of Fame by the American Advertising Federation. He is the former chairman of the Magazine Publishers of America and currently serves as Senior Advisor for Solera Capital, a New York–based private equity firm.

Audrey Edwards, coauthor of Children of the Dream: The Psychology of Black Success, is a veteran award-winning journalist and editor. She has served as executive editor and editor at Essence magazine. She has held the executive editor position at Black Enterprise magazine and senior editor positions at Family Circle and More magazines. In addition, she has written for numerous magazines, including the New York Times Sunday Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, Glamour, Seventeen, and the Columbia Journalism Review. She has also written for the online publications TheRoot.com and Salon.com.

Camille Cosby is a producer and educator. She coproduced the Tony Award-nominated Having Our Say, which won a 1999 Peabody Award for television, and has also served as executive producer of numerous film projects.

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The Man from Essence

CHAPTER 1

The “Godfather” Calls a Sit-Down

1968. It was a very bad year, perhaps the worst of times in a nation rocked by political assassinations, urban riots, underground revolutionaries, and defiant protestors. Visionary leaders were violently killed: Martin Luther King, Jr., gunned down on a Memphis hotel balcony in April; Robert F. Kennedy shot in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen in June; black riots erupting in dozens of American cities following the killings. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago had been convulsed by rioting and confrontations in August as the city’s notorious head-bashing cops knocked heads outside the International Amphitheatre, ferociously beating down thousands of angry black and white protestors who were threatening to tear apart America as we knew it. A grim national report on the civil unrest, commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson, was released that year and warned that the country was in danger of moving toward two societies—one black, one white—separate and unequal.

Yet if 1968 seemed to be the worst of times, it also held out hope for some for better times, and I, for one, needed that. I had already suffered through my own miserable times, losing a college football scholarship to the University of New Mexico, flunking out of law school in Washington, DC, six years later, and finding myself, now at 28, back home at the St. Mary’s housing projects in the South Bronx, living with my mother and stepfather.

Like most blacks, I was furious over the assassinations of King and Kennedy, but I knew violence was not the answer to the many problems besetting us as a people. Money was, pure and simple. Not money for the sake of lavish spending or grand profiling, but money for the real good it can do in improving lives.

I cannot say it was money alone, though, that drove me to apply for a position with First National City Bank three years before. That year, 1965, I just needed something constructive to do—needed to feel I was back in somebody’s game. I had returned to New York in the fall, after a seven-year absence, having spent six years in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico and another nine months in Washington, DC, as a student in Georgetown University’s School of Law.

I washed out after the first year.

Devastated, I spent the summer working for an antipoverty program in DC before heading back home to New York. Still reeling from what I considered a colossal failure, I was too ashamed to tell anyone, not even my mother, I had flunked out of law school. In fact, I was so dislocated I actually rode the subway two or three times a week from the Bronx to Columbia University’s campus in upper Manhattan, where I would hang around the law school, pretending to still be a law student. I told my mother I had transferred from Georgetown to Columbia. This went on for weeks. How pitiful was that?

But nobody wants to dance with you at a pity party. Shortly after flunking out I called Howard Mathany, dean of men at the University of New Mexico, to confess the awful truth. The dean had been an early mentor while I was a student at the university, helping me to remain in school after I lost my scholarship. I stayed in touch with him when I left Albuquerque to go to Georgetown. And now I trusted this white man enough to call and pretty much spill my guts.

“Dean Mathany, I flunked out,” I blurted into the phone. “I guess I just don’t have what it takes to be a lawyer. I never saw myself as an intellectual heavyweight or anything, but—”

“C’mon, Ed!” Dean Mathany cut me off impatiently. “You’ve always had many interests, and you do have a master’s degree.” True. I had lost my football scholarship my freshman year, but was able to return to the university the next year through some string pulling and end up with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees six years later.

Dean Mathany casually mentioned that he had a friend who worked in personnel at First National City Bank (now Citibank) in New York. The bank was looking to hire talented minorities in its executive training program in New York City. “Maybe you should think about applying,” the dean gently suggested.

I realized this was Dean Mathany’s easy way of telling me that one setback did not mean I was without prospects. I still had skills. Failing law school did not mean I was a failure. It just meant I had not done well in a particular situation. That struck me. And I would continue to be struck throughout my life by all the people I would meet—people I admired and respected—who saw a winning prospect in me when I often could not see anything at all.

I was drowning in shame and self-doubt the day I called Dean Mathany to say I had washed out of law school, but he was not about to listen to any “po’ is me” riff. Instead, he threw out the life preserver of faith and affirmation by suggesting I think about applying for a position with First National City Bank.

Just a thought. But sometimes that’s all you need to turn around a life.

I applied for and got the job at First National City Bank, and three years later, in the fall of 1968, got the call that would transform my life. It was from Russell L. Goings, a vice president at the Shearson, Hammill and Company investment banking firm.

“Ed, I’m inviting a bunch of you young bloods to a meeting down here at headquarters,” he boomed over the phone. “I want you to come. It’s time we sit down with these guys here at Shearson and get them to put some money behind their liberal rhetoric.”

Then in his late thirties, Russ Goings, whom I would later come to think of as the Godfather of Essence, was a great hulking bear of a man—handsome, articulate, confident, imposing at six foot four, with a large, brash personality to match. He understood that the real battle for civil rights would be won not in the streets, but on the economic front of black entrepreneurship. He had played professional football for the Buffalo Bills, but as Shearson’s first black vice president, Russ knew the winning game in the late 1960s for young, educated American Negroes (as we were then called) was black capitalism, and he was in the forefront of getting Wall Street to aid in that effort.

I didn’t know any of the guys at the meeting Russ was holding that evening of November 8, 1968, but we were all pretty much alike. Young and black, tall, short, dark-skinned or light, we were smart and educated, professional, well employed, and had one thing in common: We wanted to be real players in the American game of business. We wanted to make a difference in the lives of our people—at least I did.

Russ, sitting at the head of the large conference table in one of Shearson’s meeting rooms at its Wall Street headquarters, was telling us that the most effective way to do that was to own our own businesses. This is why he had called the meeting, he said. He wanted to discuss business ideas and ways to raise capital to fund them.

“Now, I’m not talkin’ about no mom-and-pop operation you could fund with your Christmas Club savings accounts,” Russ thundered, leaning his large frame forward. “Let’s think big and bold. Come up with some business ideas I think these Wall Street boys will want to invest in, and I’ll guarantee you a meeting with them. Shearson will help you put together a business plan, identify funding...