The Negro Digest, a leading African American periodical, was published from 1942 to 1951. The first title produced by the Johnson Publishing Company, the Digest had an international focus that connected Jim Crow to racial oppression around the world. However, while the magazine challenged white supremacy on a local and global level, its patriotic tone and faith in American democracy occasionally restricted its global analysis of racism. Ultimately, the internationalism of the Negro Digest was quintessentially American – wedded to the exceptional status of American freedom and an overriding belief that the US could change the world for the better
The Negro Digest was founded in 1942 by Johnson Publishing as a Black version of the Reader’s Digest. He used the money that he made from the Reader’s Digest to later launch the magazines Ebony and Jet. The Negro Digest folded in 1951 buy was revived later in the 1960s as a magazine of culture, poetry, politics and theater. In 1970 its name was changed to Black World, but it stopped publication in 1976
Revived in the 1960s, the Negro Digest exchanged its original good-news policy for a more combative Pan-Africanist stance under the editorship of Hoyt Fuller. Its revised title, Black World, reflected Fuller’s embrace of the vision and terminology of the Black Power movement
Johnson had the idea of funding the Negro Digest by writing everyone on their mailing list and soliciting a two-dollar, prepaid subscription, calculating that even a 15 percent response would give Johnson Publishing the amount needed to publish the first issue. To obtain the five hundred dollars needed for postage to mail his letters, he had to use his mother’s furniture as a security on a loan

Johnson still had troubles to overcome. No one wanted to put the periodical on their newsstands, many people didn’t think it would sell. Johnson eventually persuaded his friends to haunt neighborhood newsstands, demanding copies of the Negro Digest. Joseph Levy, who was a distributor at the time was impressed and decided to work with Johnson. Together they collaborated on marketing ideas and eventually opened doors that allowed Negro Digest to hit the newsstands in many urban centers
The very first issue of the Negro Digest sold roughly 3,000 copies. Eventually, over six months the magazine published close to 50,000 copies per month. One of the most interesting columns of the magazine was entitle “If I Were a Negro.” This column concentrated strongly on the unsolicited advice that the African-American race had received, by asking prominent citizens mainly of the white race for resolution to unsolved black problems. As a result of First Lady Roosevelt’s contribution to the popular column “If I Were a Negro,” the copies doubled overnight

Works Cited
1. F.B.I. Eyes Digital Archive. http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/fbeyes/digest
2. NICHOLAS GRANT. The Negro Digest: Race, Exceptionalism and the Second World War. Volume 52, Issue 2. May 2018 , pp. 358-389
3. THE NEGRO DIGEST THE BLACK VERSION OF THE READER’S DIGEST. https://blackthen.com/the-negro-digest-the-black-version-of-the-readers-digest/