Ebony and Jet magazines have partnered with Google to digitize the archives of Ebony, Jet, and Negro Digest/Black world magazines. Recently we learned of Google’s attempt to digitize the Life magazine photo archives, but news about the Ebony/Jet partnership was announced with little fanfare in the mainstream media.
The partnership allows readers to connect to a historical record that includes nine magazine titles and 20 million photographs that document more than 60 years of African American history, life and culture.
While this resource will be very use to historians, educators, and anyone else interested in viewing black life through a black-centered lens, the editors of EbonyJet.com think that this project has even greater implications:
(T)he most powerful result of this archive will be the way it changes your mind and the way it provides the life-changing lesson that no matter how hip, smart and revolutionary you imagine yourself to be in this new century, somebody in 1945 was hipper, smarter and setting the ground rules for revolution way before their time.