That collection could soon be opened to the public after an auction Wednesday in Chicago.
The winning bid came from a group of four major foundations, who in a flurry of phone calls, emails and texts over the last nine days, banded together in a highly unusual effort and bought the archive for $30 million.
Leaders of the foundations — the Ford Foundation, The J. Paul Getty Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — said Thursday that they were determined to save the archive, considered the most significant collection of photography depicting African American life in the 20th century. They agreed to donate the archive to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Getty Research Institute so that it would be widely accessible to researchers, scholars and the public.
Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said in an interview that the group began to form only last week. He said he was at the Prado Museum in Madrid last Tuesday when he read a news article about the impending auction on his phone. Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, emailed Walker, suggesting — with a great deal of urgency — that they had to do something.
“The narrative that is held in that archive is central to the narrative of America in the second half of the 20th century,” Walker said. “The concern was that it should be brought into the public domain.”
Walker and Alexander talked to leaders of two more institutions and brought them on board. Each foundation promised between $5 million and $12.5 million.
Ebony and Jet, once ubiquitous publications in the homes of African American families, chronicled the lives of black politicians, civil rights leaders, musicians, athletes, writers and everyday people.
The auction was part of bankruptcy proceedings for Johnson Publishing, based in Chicago, which founded the magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. The company, which sold the titles years ago but held onto the photo archive, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in April.
The sale of the photographs is subject to court approval.
Alexander said it was too early to say exactly what would be done with the millions of photos in the archive, but the guiding principle is that the public should be able to see them.
“For decades, people found black life in its full variety in Johnson publications,” Alexander said. “I think we actually cannot even fully measure what it is going to mean to have these images available.”
The news was a relief to historians who feared that the Ebony archive would be acquired by a collector and hidden away.
“It is impossible to overstate the importance of the accessibility of Ebony and Jet archive for not only historians and researchers, for the general public,” said Sarah Lewis, a historian at Harvard. “Understanding American culture means understanding African American culture. This collection, as an archive, offers an invaluable oculus onto black life.”
The archive has been held in a warehouse in Chicago as its fate was being determined. The auction began last week and attracted multiple bidders, continuing until Wednesday. Details of the other bids were not made public.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.