On the heels of his success with Ebony, the African American version of Life, Chicago magazine publisher John H. Johnson was looking to start a new publication in 1951. Magazine trends that year pointed away from the large-format publications such as Life, Look, and Ebony to pocket-sized digests, fast information for busy readers. Johnson envisioned a black version of Quick, a short-lived mainstream news digest, providing a weekly synopsis of important news and events for African Americans. Jet magazine, introduced on November 1, 1951, quickly gained acceptance among blacks for providing understandable, accurate information, and they came to view it as the definitive word on current events, the so-called "Negro's bible." In the process of achieving that fame, Jet was also the first national publication to print the photograph of the corpse of a fourteen-year-old boy lynched for whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955. That picture alerted African Americans...