There weren't very many black-oriented publications in the 1960s. The best were published by Johnson Publishing of Chicago. The two leading black magazines were Ebony and Jet. Of the two, my recollections of Jet are the strongest. In the 1960's Jet was a diminutive weekly the size of a postcard, selling for only twenty cents. Ebony, on the other hand, was (and is) big and lavish, more or less a black interpretation of Life magazine. When I first read Jet in the early '60s, I made no association between the word "Jet" and my race. The only thing the word "jet" meant to me was a modern, powerful and exciting airplane. It seemed a great name for any magazine.

Jet was created in 1951, the same year that I was, and for at least a couple of decades was important to black people in ways that may be difficult to appreciate today. It, together with Ebony, was virtually the only means of conveying a nationwide message. There were no black cable stations or web sites. Afrocentric movies were few and far-between. The black press was alive and well in major cities, but the few magazines such as Jet were unique in conveying a national perspective. Several things stand out in my memory. Jet certainly violated the taboos of mainstream magazines in its graphic, black-and-white presentation of violence and death. Even as a youngster, with the normal morbid fascination with such things, I wondered whether the regular presentation of such carnage was gratuitous. I particularly recall a photograph of a dead civil rights worker whose body had been shattered by a bomb planted in his truck. Another memorable photograph showed the recovery of Otis Redding's body from Lake Michigan. Those images stick in your mind.

Jet focused much of its attention on black celebrities, and, by my perception, seemed to go out of its way to depict interracial couples. Photos of various stars and their white spouses implied that such relationships were important, newsworthy, and approved. The April 6, 1967 issue, for instance, only carried the photos of three married couples. Two of them were Lou Rawls and Quincy Jones and their white wives.The photographs I really enjoyed, however, were the shapely, bathing-suited models that Jet always featured at the center of the magazine. This was more than mere cheesecake. It was also a social statement, proclaiming the pulchritude and desirability of black women. Who could say that any of these women couldn't have been Miss America?

Another regular feature of Jet was a listing of the scheduled appearances of black performers on television. In the early- to mid-1960s these appearances could easily be summarized on one half of one of Jet's tiny pages, still leaving plenty of room for a photo. I always waited for an issue to say "Sorry - no Negroes on television this month." In April, 1967 you could catch Ivan Dixon on Hogan's Heroes, Eartha Kitt on the Hollywood Squares, while Louis Armstrong put in an appearance on the variety show Hollywood Palace and Sydney Poitier and Harry Belafonte headed a black cast reviewing "Negro humor" on ABC Stage 67.

Advertising was obviously a problem for Jet. That 1967 issue only had three ads, and two were for Supreme Beauty Products, a company owned by the publisher. It's a little surprising that is survived, but it did. It's now just one among many magazines aimed at the black community. I don't read it much anymore, but I'm glad it was there when we needed it.

Copyright 1998 by Patrick Inniss.  All rights reserved.