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George Foreman is on the cover. He’s got a big smile — portraying the grill maker we’ve come to love more than a fearsome boxer — and is wearing a gaudy “World Heavyweight Champion” belt and a red velvet suit. The cover copy reads, “‘I AM BLACK AND I LIKE BEING BLACK’ … HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMP GEORGE FOREMAN IN EXCLUSIVE SEPIA INTERVIEW.”
I’m trying to be careful as I take the magazine out of its too-flimsy crystal-clear protector. Despite having various pen marks and every other page being dog-eared, this thing is still out of my budget. I won’t relay the current sticker price, but I’ll say it’s astronomically more than the 75-cent tag printed on the cover. After all, this is a collector’s item. A rarity. Something akin to a blue moon in the publishing world.
The issue says September 1974.
The following month, Foreman would fight Muhammad Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire, in what’s dubbed The Rumble in the Jungle, one of the most famous boxing matches of all time.
For the vast majority of publications, to print an exclusive interview with one of the world’s most famous and popular athletes a month before a championship bout would be a coup worthy of industry gloating. And it’s not to say that writers and editors weren’t high-fiving and popping champagne corks in the Sepia offices following the publication of this edition. But to look through the archives of this Fort Worth-based and -founded magazine, having someone as iconic as Big George on the cover was far from unusual.
Courtesy Sepia Archive
THE BEGINNING
In 1945, publisher John H. Johnson went to press with the first-ever magazine to target a primarily Black audience. The publication, Ebony, started in the not-so-segregated city of Chicago and was an instant success, selling out its initial press run of 25,000 copies.
Two years later and 900 miles south, Horace Jefferson Blackwell, an ice cream and second-hand goods salesman, responded to Johnson’s achievement by creating two magazines, World’s Messenger and Negro Achievements, with an unabashed Black target audience. Blackwell created the latter title to shed a light on African American culture, religion, civil rights, education, and leadership. World’s Messenger’s editorial focus was more niche, printing real-life Black experiences written in the language of the Southern working-class.
At the time, Blackwell’s publishing company was the only self-contained Black magazine publishing firm in the U.S. The offices for both magazines were located in, as local historian Richard Selcer put it, “the heart of Jim Crow country”: Fort Worth.
In 1947, like most of the U.S. south of the Mason Dixon line, Fort Worth was a segregated city. Attempting to dodge the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause by enforcing a “separate but equal” way of life, Black Fort Worthians and White Fort Worthians used separate bathrooms, drank from separate fountains, and had different movie theaters, restaurants, and even hospitals and ambulances. A brief, 200-word story on the 26th page of the April 7 edition of the Star-Telegram reports on a Black soldier stationed at then Carswell Air Force Base getting into a physical altercation after refusing to sit in the “Black area” of the bus. According to the article, the soldier was charged with attempted murder.
Despite the unrest and obstacles, Blackwell’s magazines would continue to hit newsstands every month. Only two years after the first issue of Negro Achievements went to press, Blackwell died, leaving the future of his publications in limbo.
He did make one thing clear, however. In a farewell column, Blackwell expressed hope that his debt-ridden magazines would not end up in the hands of a White publisher. “There is not a White man in the United States who can publish a Negro magazine,” Blackwell wrote.
Courtesy Sepia Archive
THE MIDDLE
In June of 1950, a federal judge ordered nearby Euless Independent School District to stop bussing Black students to racially segregated Fort Worth to receive schooling. You see, at the conclusion of the 1948-49 academic year, the school district’s board of trustees elected to close the town’s sole Black school due to disrepair and announced that Black students would be transported back and forth to Fort Worth’s all-Black schools. After a group of outraged Black parents sued the district, the judge ruled that, under the equal protection clause, Euless had to provide all students, regardless of color, the same education — segregated or not. The Euless School Board attempted to fund the repairs for the Black-only school by putting a $25,000 bond to a vote. But the bond was summarily defeated, and the school became worse for wear when the building was significantly damaged by vandals after improvements began.
At the same time, districts were working tirelessly to get all-Black school accreditation, as this was the only way to keep schools segregated and constitutional (“separate but equal”).
The same year the above took place, a decade and a half before Jim Crow would finally relinquish his stranglehold on the state of Texas, Blackwell’s dying wishes were not granted. Ultimately, a White Jewish plumber named George Levitan purchased the two titles and renamed the company Good Publishing.
“He didn’t have a publishing background,” Selcer says. “He came out of the plumbing business. He was a plumbing contractor. What the hell motivated him to buy these magazines?”
Despite extensive research, to this day, no one really knows why Levitan bought this cache of Black magazines. But one could certainly argue that he might have proved Blackwell wrong. Heck, he might’ve proven that anyone can publish a magazine. While opinions on his choices of content are subjective, and a topic from which I will refrain, Levitan not only kept the magazine afloat until his death in 1976 — 26 years after its purchase — but he doubled the company’s products by adding two publications and increasing the flagship’s circulation.
While Levitan had lived in Fort Worth for over 20 years, he came by way of Michigan, where he was born in 1905. Before entering the plumbing industry — and long before he entered the publishing industry — Levitan had worked as a sewing machine salesman.
Though Levitan quickly changed the name of World’s Messenger to Bronze Thrills — and stuck to the magazine’s penchant for long-form narrative pieces — it would take him three years to change the name of Negro Achievements to Sepia.
Operating a diverse, desegregated, and intensely loyal staff, Sepia, which Selcer describes as the publishing company’s crown jewel, would take off. In the decades that followed, Sepia would rival the likes of Ebony and Jet as a household name within the Black community. As the publication introduced more photojournalism, its coverage and featured increasingly more prestigious celebrities (Ray Charles, the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye), Sepia became an influential page-turner.
“Sepia was supposed to be the Black version of Look magazine,” Selcer says. “In the sense that it was photojournalism. Beautiful photography along with the stories.”
But that’s not to say Levitan didn’t take risks or dip his toes in controversy. Sure, the magazine reported on the civil rights movement — “No African-American magazine could’ve survived the sixties without reporting on civil rights,” Selcer says — but he also funded creative and investigative pieces to stir debate.
Serving as both the magazine’s most famous and infamous moment, in 1959, Mansfield-based writer John Howard Griffin approached Levitan with the idea to chemically darken his skin and live for six weeks in the segregated South as a Black man.
While, at the time, Griffin was living in Mansfield, he was raised in Fort Worth, growing up in the Fairmount neighborhood and briefly attending Paschal High School before moving to France to study psychiatry. Getting swept up in World War II, Griffin joined the French Resistance as a medic, smuggling Jewish children to England. After his name showed up on a Nazi death list, Griffin returned to Fort Worth and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps, serving as a radio operator in the South Pacific. A few months before the end of the war, Griffin would go blind following an enemy air raid that blasted pieces of shrapnel into Griffin’s eyes. Then, in 1955, spinal malaria paralyzed his legs. He was blind and paraplegic.
Somehow, someway, for reasons that can’t be explained, within a year, Griffin would recover from malaria and regain the eyesight that abandoned him over a decade earlier.
Having already published two books based on his war-time experiences, Griffin was a known commodity — an established and talented writer. And with his health restored, he became inspired to show that civil rights was more than a “Southern problem.” It was a human problem.
“It’s a crazy idea,” Levitan told Griffin after approaching him with his idea. “You’ll get yourself killed fooling around down there.” But he nonetheless gave Griffin the green light, funding his trip and expenses for medical procedures. In return, Sepia published his first-hand account in a six-part series in 1960, titled “Journey into Shame.”
The articles received international attention, with both praise and condemnation being directed Johnson’s way. The following year, he would expand his initial six-part series into a book, Black Like Me, that would quickly become a staple on required-reading lists for high school students. And, in 1964, the book would turn into a major motion picture starring James Whitmore.
While his ambitious ruse can make a modern eye wince, there’s no denying its cultural and educational impact.
In a retrospective review, Bruce Watson of Smithsonian Magazine wrote, “Fifty years after its publication, ‘Black Like Me’ remains a remarkable document. John Howard Griffin changed more than the color of his skin. He helped change the way America saw itself.”
Courtesy Sepia Archive
THE END
Through drastic shifts in race relations and multiple iterations of Sepia nameplates, Levitan kept the magazine afloat with largely the same arsenal of employees. Kicking to the curb any notion that the publishing industry is a revolving door of writers, graphic designers, and sales reps, the average length of service for an employee at Good Publishing was 16 years. This is six times the average length of employment at a magazine today.
In 1969, one of Sepia’s employees, Lucille B. Smith, who served as the first food editor for the magazine, also became the first Black woman to become a member of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. Beatrice Pringle, who worked at the company since 1960, took over publisher duties following Levitan’s death in 1976. Griffin, the man whose story gave the magazine international attention, would die four years later, in 1980, from complications caused by diabetes.
While the magazine kept an impressive six-figure circulation number into the early ’80s, the publishing company’s offices on Harding Street would close its doors in 1983, seven years into Pringle’s term as publisher.
With the digital edge still decades away, one can’t blame touchscreens or small attention spans for the demise of Sepia. Selcer has a different hypothesis for why this print publication went belly-up. Since society was no longer forcibly segregated, the public was no longer interested in segregated media. Black people in the 50s and 60s had no choice, the only way they could get relatable content or unflinching stories about people within their own community was to have their own magazine.
“At some point, if you were interested in music, no matter the genre — soul, funk, psychedelia, James Brown — you read Rolling Stone Magazine,” Selcer says. “You didn’t read Sepia or Jet or Ebony.”
Despite printing presses no longer rolling out their content, with 434 issues printed and thousands of stories told, there’s little doubt Sepia has left an indelible mark on readers and the publishing world alike. Exhibits across the nation routinely images from their massive photo archives and below-mint magazines are selling on eBay for upward of $100.
“They’re collectors items,” Selcer says. “At the time [the magazines] came out, you’d have a hard time giving ‘em away. And now, if you happen across one, it’s a collector’s item that’s money.”
