John Johnson, America's first black publishing mogul as founder of Jet, Ebony and other titles, died yesterday of congestive heart failure at the age of  87. He lived in Chicago.
   Johnson modeled Ebony and Jet after after Life and Look, at a time when the two weekly picture magazines were on coffee tables all across America. It was 1942, with World War II raging, when he began his publishing venture, but it wasn't long before Johnson's titles were to be found everywhere in America's still-segregated black communities, on coffee tables, in offices and barbershops. 
  In 1982, Johnson became the first black person to be named to the Forbes 400, and at his death his  business empire is estimated to be worth almost $500 million. That includes the magazines and and a line of fashion products.
   A fierce advocate of civil rights for African Americans, and something of a racial separatist, Johnson wasn’t too pleased that in 1990 more than one in 10 readers of Ebony and Jet were white. “This is more than I would like to have,” he told The New York Times. “I want to be king of the black hill not the mixed hill.”
   He also counseled young blacks against joining white-run businesses unless they wanted to be stuck on the lower rungs of middle management. “But if, like me, you’re temperamentally unsuited to that and want to reach the top, do something else,” he told The Times.
   The grandson of slaves, Johnson was born in 1918 in Arkansas City, Ark. His father was killed in an accident at the sawmill where he worked when Johnson was 8. His mother, who worked as a domestic, ultimately re-married and joined the black Southern exodus to Chicago.
   Johnson was a star student at an all-black high school, where he was president of his class and editor of the school paper. A speech he gave at an Urban League dinner after graduation so impressed Harry Pace, president of the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Co., that he gave Johnson a job and financed a scholarship for him at the University of Chicago.
   Johnson dropped out of school, but he became editor of the insurance company’s internal magazine. In a precursor to his own first publication, Johnson devoted much of the magazine to articles printed elsewhere about blacks.
   In 1942, while still working at Supreme Life, Johnson convinced his mother to help him procure the $500 he needed to start his own magazine. He used his mom's furniture as collateral for the loan. The result was Negro Digest, an imitation of Reader’s Digest. Before it was even published, he asked 20,000 of the insurance company’s policyholders for $2 each to subscribe. About 3,000 took him up on it, and Johnson’s publishing empire was underway. Within a year, the magazine’s circulation jumped to 50,000.
   In 1945 he founded Ebony. His wife came up with the name. With its emphasis on arts, politics, business and social issues, the magazine quickly eclipsed Negro Digest.
   “We wanted to give blacks a new sense of somebodiness, a new sense of self-respect,” Johnson said, according to The Washington Post. “We wanted to tell them who they were and what they could do. We believed blacks needed positive images to fulfill their potentialities.”
   In 1951, Johnson launched Jet, a pocket-sized weekly news magazine. The premiere cover had a picture of Edna Robinson, wife of star boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. She was clad in a mink coat, and inside the magazine instructed readers how to build their wealth to afford such a garment of their own.
   Jet played a role in advancing the civil rights movement when in 1955 it published stark photos of Emmett Till, after the Chicago teenager was lynched in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
   Johnson started his fashion products company in 1946. Beauty Star later became Fashion Fair Cosmetics. Then Johnson turned to philanthropy. After a $4 million gift to Howard University’s School of Communications, it was renamed for him.
   Johnson believed  perseverance was the key to his success. 
   “From my personal story, people can learn that a good education and determination not to fail can be helpful,” Johnson said in a book about successful black Americans. “I say failure is a word I don’t accept. I’ve just refused to fail, and as a result of that, I’ve succeeded.”