In the spectrum of great black publications like JET Magazine and EBONY, there’s one often left out of the conversation: Sepia Magazine.

For almost 40 years, Sepia pushed the boundaries of design, content, and photography in black publications, positioning itself as a LIFE Magazine for black readers.

Where Jet covered a wide range of general interest topics, and Ebony documented current events in news, culture and entertainment, Sepia took a decidedly different tack, turning its pages into a in-depth, photojournalistic view into the lives of everyday black people and celebrities in arts, music and civil rights in particular.

First published one year after Ebony in 1946, Fort Worth, TX headquartered Sepia entered the black publishing landscape during a curious time for America. Although they’d suffered racism in their own armed forces, black soldiers and the valor with which they fought for a country that still hadn’t afforded them full civil rights had been recognized globally and back in the States. Those unexpected but significant gains in equality, and the fact that a newly enfranchised black populace naturally wanted to be more informed about its government, led to one of the biggest black publication booms in American history.

And while Ebony and later, Jet, had things covered on the national front, the pages of Sepia were where black Americans could feel seen and heard. Headlines like “The Black School That’s the Best in Los Angeles,” “The Ghetto Through the Eyes of Youthful Photographers,” and “The Black Chinese: How Africa and the Orient mixed in the U.S.” are just a small smattering of the diverse topics Sepia featured. So keenly were they attuned to the mindset of the middle-class black American that they soon became the highest selling magazine among that demographic. That targeting strategy paid off two-fold in that black soldiers still fighting wars abroad could browse its pages for a true temperature check on the state of affairs at home, and vice versa.

Sepia’s dual and rather polar audiences provided the opportunity to establish a dialogue unlike that of any American publication. Their column “Our Men in Vietnam” gave black soldiers a platform to sound off about their experiences in the United States military. Whether writing about the continued racism in their ranks, or having personal reservations about their role in white Western imperialism, black soldiers found a safe space in Sepia’s column that encouraged them to send their “experiences, heartaches and joys while fighting communism” and black Americans could sympathize with them like never before.

Although Sepia’s staff and content was primarily black, its original owner was a Jewish man, and that culturally rich start to the magazine led to content that eventually expanded to include Hispanic and Asian Americans as well, as their communities often faced the same institutional racism. It also gave Sepia an interesting new perspective from which they could tackle issues of racism – one they pushed to its absolute limit in their stunning exposé, “Life As a Negro.”

After controversially semi-permanently darkening his skin, a white Sepia contributor named John Howard Griffin traveled the Deep South for 6 weeks as a black man, and so eye-opening was the experience that when the magazine series ended, he expanded upon it in his iconic 1961 book, Black Like Me. John himself admitted that upon undertaking this “anthropological study” as he called it, he was embarrassed to find that even “[his] own prejudices, at the emotional level, were hopelessly ingrained in [him].” In response, one black reviewer wrote “since there are white people who doubt everything a Negro says, perhaps now they will hear us when we say the plight of the American Negro is a disgrace.” In the 1977 reprint of his book, John’s epilogue astutely and mournfully pointed out that in the years since that original printing, his “personal experience was that whites still didn’t hear.”

The 7-month long series further solidified and legitimized Sepia’s place in the American landscape and the black American experience it so richly captured. With its ambitious journalism alongside beautifully photographed moments, Sepia simultaneously shared the essence of black America and exposed a quintessentially American contradiction that John Howard Griffin himself articulated so well: “those who embrace the strangely shallow dream of white supremacy are the true killers of society based on freedom, equality and justice.” Sepia published its last issue in 1983 after being bought out by Ebony and quietly shut down, but in the 37 years that it graced newsstands, black households, and trenches worldwide, the magazine carved out a space where blackness had permission to be complex, curious, and most of all, authentic.

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