Rest In Peace

We would like to send our condolences to the family of Eunice W. Johnson.

In case you don't know who she is. She gave Ebony magazine its name and for almost 50 years produced an influential traveling fashion show that brought haute couture to African-Americans while raising millions of dollars for charity.

The widow of Johnson Publishing Co. founder John H. Johnson, Mrs. Johnson, 93, died of renal failure Sunday, Jan. 3, in her Chicago Thome, according to a company spokeswoman.

Mrs. Johnson was born Eunice Walker and grew up in Selma, Ala. Her father was a doctor, and her mother was a high school principal and a teacher at Selma University, which had been co-founded by Mrs. Johnson's maternal grandfather. At Talladega College in Alabama, she received a bachelor's degree in sociology. She later studied journalism at Northwestern University and interior design at the former Ray-Vogue School of Design.

She met John H. Johnson in 1940 at a dance hall called Bacon's Casino in Chicago. The couple were married in Selma in 1941 and returned to Chicago, where she worked by his side as he started a publishing company with $500 borrowed against his mother's furniture.

A close business partner of her husband's since the beginning of Johnson Publishing in 1942, Mrs. Johnson remained the company's secretary-treasurer at the time of her death and for years wrote a monthly fashion feature for Ebony magazine.

Johnson Publishing's flagship, conceived as an African-American version of Life magazine and published since 1945, was named by Mrs. Johnson to reflect the mystique of fine black ebony wood, said Wendy Parks of Johnson Publishing.

But Mrs. Johnson's greatest legacy may be her role as producer and director of the Ebony Fashion Fair, an influential event that for decades has been a showcase for the world's top designers. The fair was started in the 1950s as a fundraiser for a hospital in New Orleans at the suggestion of Jessie Covington Dent, wife of a former Dillard University president.

It was a success, and Mrs. Johnson and her husband decided to take the concept on the road. Produced annually since 1958, the fair became a traveling fashion extravaganza that now makes nearly 180 stops a year in the U.S. and abroad to largely black audiences from across economic strata.

"It brought to the lower-middle-class black people a sense of what fashion really was. She gave the local community a chance to see these clothes," said Andre Leon Talley, editor at large for Vogue magazine.

The fair was both "an aspirational as well as an inspirational experience," Talley said. It became a showcase for a new generation of black designers as well as early African-American models. The show's director and producer since 1961, Mrs. Johnson was initially a curiosity as she toured French and Italian boutiques and fashion houses. But her sense of elegance, and her deep pocketbook, quickly made her a respected figure in the world of high fashion. "When they found out how much money I was going to spend, word got around," Mrs. Johnson said in 1997. She stayed at the best hotels, dined at the finest restaurants and dressed impeccably.

"She always had on the last word [in fashion], but it was always very elegant," Talley said. Legendary French designer Yves Saint Laurent "would receive her in the same manner he'd receive the editor of Vogue." Since its founding, the Ebony Fashion Fair has produced more than 4,000 shows and raised more than $55 million for charity, according to Johnson Publishing.

John Johnson died in 2005. Johnson Publishing is now run by the Johnsons' daughter, Linda Johnson Rice.