Getty Commits $30 Million to Digitize Ebony/Jet Archive

James Brown, Ted Williams/Johnson Publishing Archive

The Getty Trust has committed $30 million to digitize the Johnson Publishing photo archive from Ebony and Jet magazines. The archive includes 983,000 photos, 3 million negatives and slides, and 9000 audio and visual recordings. They document the daily lives of Black Americans and the careers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, and virtually every Black person who was famous in the postwar period. 

Hi-res images will ultimately be available to anyone with an Internet connection. The physical archive will be housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, with the Getty Research Institute sharing ownership. A group of works pertaining to Chicago (Johnson Publishing's headquarters) may be housed in that city.