In fact, several months before the university presented him with the distinguished honorary doctorate and the news that his name would forever be associated with the School of Communications, the founder of Ebony and Jet magazine enthusiastically quipped: “I have been a big admirer of Howard ever since I attended the first NAACP meeting in Baltimore when Thurgood Marshall was named assistant counsel. I knew that he [Marshall] was a Howard graduate and I have been so inspired by the marks that he and so many other alumni have made on this nation.”
But in 2010—five years after Johnson died at the age of 87—Howard quietly dropped his name from the School of Communications and the university is still many years away from breaking ground on a new building that was initially slated to cost $250 million and was supposed to be completed several years ago.
“It’s so embarrassing,” says one Howard University board of trustee member who asked not to be identified. “It’s rather tacky, I think, to publicly name a building after a man with such a storied and distinguished career in the media and then to drop his name without any public explanation. You don’t do folks like that.”
According to several sources, Johnson—long considered to be the nation’s top Black publisher—relished the opportunity to have the communications school named after him and pledged to financially support it and the construction of a new building.
But his daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, who is now chairman of the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company, did not share his same passion for the project and opted instead to support her alma mater, the University of Southern California (USC), after her father died.
A former USC trustee, Rice gave $2.5 million to USC’s Annenberg School for Communication in 2007 to establish the Johnson Communication Leadership Center, which provides undergraduate scholarships and hosts seminars focused specifically on issues relating to African-Americans in the media.
