This summer, I mailed off a treasure trove of old family photographs for digitization to make them easily shareable between my parents, brothers and cousins. Only a precious few snapshots displayed time stamps on the back; most did not. When appreciating all these priceless memories in the cloud, a slight pattern emerged. Present in the background—on coffee tables, nightstands, in the hands of family—EBONY or JET magazines appeared in many of these analog pics from the 1970s and ’80s. A print of my mom lounging in the bedroom of an apartment I barely remembered had no specific year marked on it. But right there was basketball star Wilt Chamberlain on the cover of the EBONY magazine in her hand, identifying the time as January 1974.

For 80 years, in so many African American places and spac

See Full Page