Eunice Walker Johnson
*Eunice Walker Johnson was born on April 4, 1916. She was a Black businesswoman.
Eunice Walker was born in Selma, Alabama, to Nathaniel Walker, a physician, and Ethel Walker (née McAlpine), a high school principal. She was one of four children. She graduated with a degree in sociology from Talladega College in 1938. During college, Johnson joined Delta Sigma Theta. Johnson met her future husband, John H. Johnson, in 1940 while attending Loyola University Chicago and was married after she earned her master's degree the following year.
Together with her husband, she established The Negro Digest in 1942. Its rapid growth encouraged them to create Ebony, a monthly readership of 1.25 million, and its weekly companion Jet, which reached a circulation 900,000. Johnson began the Ebony Fashion Tour (later known as Ebony Fashion Fair) as a fundraiser in 1958 for a hospital in New Orleans. In its half-century existence, the tour visited 200 cities across the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean, raising over $50 million for charity.
The fashion tour was a pioneer in using African American models on the runway and helped highlight the works of African American designers. Building on her difficulties in finding cosmetics suited to the skin tones of her models, Johnson created Fashion Fair Cosmetics in 1973 as a line of makeup sold in leading department stores. Eunice Johnson died of renal failure on January 3, 2010, at the age of 93, at her home in Chicago.
She had a daughter, Linda Johnson-Rice, chairwoman and chief executive of Johnson Publishing and a granddaughter. Her son, John H. Johnson Jr., died in December 1981 at age 25. In 2010, Chicago Public Schools opened Johnson College Prep High School, a public charter high school in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, in honor of Johnson and her husband, John H. Johnson.
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