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84 7 “THE LITTLE MAGAZINE THAT COULD” COMES TO WASHINGTON By the end of 1955, it was clear that a bureau in the nation’s capital was a must if Jet were going to succeed as a news magazine. Much of the news germane to the civil rights movement was originating in Washington. The NAACP was pursuing cases in federal courts, including the highest court in the land; access to the American president was no longer through White House maids and valets—there was now a black assistant to the president, E. Frederic Morrow; and there were three black members of Congress—Detroit freshman Charles Diggs, Chicago’s William Dawson, and New York’s powerful and unpredictable Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., all of whom were pushing for civil rights across the nation and not just for pork in their own districts. Jet, too, was growing and changing from primarily entertainment/ sports/society tidbits and gossip, to a hard-hitting source of news about black progress on all fronts, providing eyewitness coverage of the spreading civil rights revolution in the South, as well as day-to-day strides in the North (although the cover still almost invariably featured a black beauty or someone from the entertainment world). In fact, so painstaking had the magazine become to include mention of every significant development in the struggle, that it came to be said over time, “If you didn’t read it in Jet, it didn’t happen.” Managing editor Robert Johnson (no relation to the publisher) went even further, calling Jet the Negro “bible,” reporting the gospel or “good news” as well as the bad, and providing a beacon (in convenient pocket-size) for the arduous trek to freedom. Assigned by John H. Johnson to search for a suitable Washington bureau chief, I concluded after interviewing the candidates that I was the best person for the job, and easily convinced Mr. J. After the Nieman Fellowship, I’d lived in D.C. for two years and knew it pretty well. Returning in the role of "The Little Magazine That Could" Comes to Washington 85 bureau chief, with the backing of a publisher determined to make it a firstclass endeavor, would enable me to pursue the stories I believed important to our readers. I would also have access to the White House, the Congress, the highest ranks of government, and the people outside government who had enough clout to be heard. All this was a vast improvement over my 1951–53 stint in the capital; but Washington in 1956 was still one of the most segregated cities in the country, and even renting space for the first-class operation John H. Johnson wanted was a challenge. Our initial foothold was in the Negro “U Street” corridor, in the law offices of J. Leon Williams, a black attorney who handled criminal as well as civil cases in the D.C. Superior Court. Johnson was discovering that the real estate market in the nation’s capital was more segregated than in New York or Los Angeles, the other two metropolises where he was determined to establish first-class bureaus. In Washington, downtown was simply off limits to black businesses, even on its less impressive side streets, and we were told this in no uncertain terms. But Johnson was a man who refused to accept failure, and his persistence paid off with a tip that there might be an exception—a building owned by Standard Oil Company, a Rockefeller interest, at 266 Constitution Avenue NW, at the foot of Capitol Hill, that was willing to make JPC the first black-owned company with a downtown D.C. office. The two-room suite we were able to lease wasn’t large enough for the top-flight operation Johnson envisioned for his D.C. bureau, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, no one in the building but the elevator operators talked to us. However, the location was great, and within months, utilizing a couple of borrowed conference rooms, we would be making the most of the building ’s bird’s eye view of the Inaugural Parade, during which the publisher and his wife hosted our first open house, also inaugurating a JPC tradition. I reported in Ticker Tape that the Johnsons welcomed an overflow 500 guests, but “overflow” had to be an understatement given the size of the suite. The item named a few of the VIPs who showed up, including FBI...

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