Ben Burns

Ben Burns (August 25, 1913 – January 29, 2000) was an American pioneering editor of black publications (including the Chicago Daily Defender, Ebony, Jet and Negro Digest) and a public relations executive in Chicago.

He was a “top executive editor” for the Johnson Publishing Company who became so well known as a “black newspaperman” – even though he was Jewish – that he was invited to submit his biography for inclusion in Who's Who in Colored America.

Burns was born Benjamin Bernstein in Chicago in 1913 to Polish Jewish parents, Alexander and Frieda Bernstein.

At the time of his birth at Michael Reese Hospital, the family lived on Chicago's Near West Side.

Burns grew up in the slums of Chicago.

His father was a house painter originally from Łódź.

His mother was born in Warsaw.

His mother divorced Alexander when Burns was a year old, and married Nathan Denison, a Chicago produce dealer.

Esther Burns's parents also lived in Chicago.

Burns spent his teen years in New York's West Side, graduating in 1930 from James Monroe High School.

He attended New York University, where he so enjoyed working on the NYU Daily News that when it was shut down in 1933 he decided not to finish his senior year.

Instead, he returned to Chicago, enrolling in the Northwestern University journalism program, from which he graduated in 1934.

In 1935, he joined the Young Communist League, in part because of its reputed opposition to the emergence of Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitism, in part because of its social positions.

Burns married Esther Stern on November 28, 1937.

The couple, married for over 62 years, had three children.

Burns obtained work at the three Communist newspapers in the United States: in 1937 at the Daily Worker (New York), in 1938 at the Midwest Daily Record (Chicago) and in 1940 at People's World (San Francisco).

With an income insufficient to support him, his wife and a prospective family, Burns and his wife decided it was time to move.

By then, the FBI was tracking the couple.

An FBI report dated April 17, 1941 noted: “Subjects leaving San Francisco for Chicago to be gone several years; future activities and intentions are unknown.”

Back in Chicago, a political connection led Burns in July 1942 to apply for a job at the Chicago Defender, a leading black weekly newspaper.

Hired as a temporary fill-in editor, he remained in that field for 35 years.

Burns's previous contacts with black people had been “practically nonexistent,” but he threw himself into his new work with gusto.

“Having committed myself wholly to Negroes' attainment of fair and equal status … I endeavored to become in every sense a 'brother' by virtue of my oneness with Negroes in values and customs, interests and concerns, reactions and resolutions,” he wrote.

“I became a Defender editor, a 'black newspaperman,' black in my orientation and thinking, in my concerns and outlook, in my friends and associations, black in everything but my skin color.”

After a stint in the U.S. Merchant Marine in 1943, Burns became, during the ensuing decades, the only Jewish editor-in-chief of a black daily (the Chicago Daily Defender, converted to a daily in 1956); the founding editor of Negro Digest (serving as editor from 1942–54); the founding (and only Jewish) editor of Ebony (1945–54); the founding editor of Duke (1957, “a black version of Playboy”); the founding editor of Jet (1950–54), the editor of Tan Confessions (founded 1950), the editor of Sepia (1955–58, 1968–77) and the editor of Guns (1956–58).

He maintained a connection to the party until he was expelled from it in 1948.

In 1952, the Chicago Defender was the second-largest circulation weekly black newspaper in the United States (circulation: 155,074).

Ebony was the largest circulation monthly black magazine (379,000), followed by Tan Confessions (200,000).

During this time, Burns worked often with John H. Johnson, who became a wealthy African-American publisher.

“My communist and Defender training in protest proved a source of continual acrimony between Johnson and me for almost all the years I worked for him,” Burns wrote.

Burns contrasted the “flame of racial militancy kindled in me” with what he characterized as Johnson's “carefully calibrated racial positivism.”

Burns was fired from the Johnson Publishing Company in 1954.

Johnson stated that Burns allowed too many sensational stories to get into Ebony, a charge Burns refuted.

In 1957, he obtained work from Ray Kroc, the head of a relatively new company called McDonald's.

In the following year, to earn a living he edited five non-black monthlies.

Leaving journalism, he entered public relations, partnering as a vice president from 1958-66 in the public relations firm of Cooper, Burns & Golin (later Golin Harris).

He later returned to serve as editor of the Chicago Daily Defender (1962–67) and Sepia (1968–77).

Burns retired from journalism and public relations in 1977, and immediately traveled to Africa with his wife.

Although Burns's paternal grandfather had been a scribe (sofer) and thus had been part of a religious Jewish family in Poland, Alexander Burns had rebelled against his upbringing.

“My father,” Burns recalled, “had carried Marx's doctrine to the ultimate in his belief that 'religion was the cyanide rather than the opiate of the people.' And so I was brought up.” Burns was a self-described atheist who had “been in a synagogue but a half-dozen times as a sightseer.”