Eunice Walker Johnson

Eunice Walker was born on the fourth of April 1916 in Selma, Alabama, into an accomplished Black professional family. Her father, Nathaniel Walker, was a physician; her mother, Ethel Walker (née McAlpine), was a high-school principal. Raised amid education and ambition, Eunice earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Talladega College in 1938 and later a master's degree from Loyola University in Chicago in 1941.

In Chicago she met and married the publisher John H. Johnson, and together they built the Johnson Publishing Company, the house behind Ebony and Jet. It was Eunice who gave the enterprise its most enduring name: in 1942 she proposed the title Ebony for the flagship magazine that would define Black American life in print for generations.

Her signal creation was the Ebony Fashion Fair, which she founded and directed from 1958 until 2009. What began as a hospital fundraiser grew into a traveling haute-couture show that crossed some two hundred cities across the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean, raising tens of millions of dollars for charity. As its principal buyer, she walked the couture houses of Paris and Rome and brought their finest to Black audiences long shut out of those rooms, placing Black models and Black designers upon the runway. Frustrated that no cosmetics matched her models' complexions, she launched Fashion Fair Cosmetics in 1973.

Eunice Walker Johnson died on the third of January 2010. She dressed a people in dignity and taught a nation to see Black beauty as high art. May her name be honored.