As a close student of Life, Mr. Johnson would no doubt have seen the dehumanizing images of African-Americans that appeared in the infamous 1937 issue of the magazine whose cover caption read “Watermelons to Market.” The cover photograph showed an unnamed black man — shirtless and well muscled — sitting with his back to the camera atop a wagonload of melons. The inside photos offered what Ms. Greer describes as a hierarchy of watermelon eaters, with white bathing beauties at the top and pigs at the bottom; in between was an image of a black woman holding a slice of melon to her face with one hand and nursing a baby with the other. The equating of blackness with sub-humanity is unmistakable in the photographs. The photo caption drives home the point:

“Nothing makes a Negro’s mouth water like a luscious, fresh-picked melon,” it reads . “Any colored ‘mammy’ can hold a huge slice in one hand while holding her offspring in the other. … What melons the Negroes do not consume will find favor with the pigs.”

The cultural critic bell hooks voiced a fundamental truth when she argued that the black liberation movement was as much a struggle over racist images as over equal access to civic institutions. Mr. Johnson may not have expressed his mission in those exact terms, but he clearly understood that a photographic magazine spotlighting high-achieving African-Americans was both a way to make money and a way to advance black claims of equal rights.

Nevertheless, the road to a high-minded Ebony that would find a place of honor on the coffee tables of the black elite passed through a cheesecake period during which the magazine relied on scantily clad — and typically light-skinned — young black women to generate buzz. (“We’re not the N.A.A.C.P .,” Mr. Johnson said. “We’re a business.”)

Ms. Greer writes in “Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African-American Citizenship,” that such images “made the magazine (and the publishing company) possible,” while images of homemaker mothers “served Johnson’s corresponding project of selling the black middle class to major advertisers.”

The magazine moved on from the sexualized images when it consolidated its appeal and went upscale. Along the way, Adam Green writes in “Selling the Race,” Johnson Publishing gave the post-migration generation “ race-affirming portrayals of art, accomplishment, work, leisure and community” that made possible new conceptions of collective interests and politics .