In lieu of storing a crap load of fading magazines, someone came up with the brilliant idea of scanning and storing them online.  Delicious!!  Recently — thanks to Twitter — I happened upon a gallery of Jet covers dating from November 15, 1951 to October 20, 2008.  Pleasantly, to my surprise, after clicking the “via” button I was able to actually read the articles in the magazine.  Oh joy, oh rapture.

The earlier magazines had some pretty seedy articles.  Over the years, Jet became the weekly that covered all things African American from entertainment to politics.  My mother was a subscriber and of course I could not wait for her to finish reading it so I could get my hot little hands on it.  As an adult, I too subscribed to Jet, Ebony, Essence and Black Enterprise but, and this is most unfortunate, I didn’t receive a lot of them.  My suspicions are they were being picked up by someone between myself and the distribution center and that is why I stopped subscribing to magazines — I won’t receive half of them, particularly if the mag contains a popular article.

If you are interested in going back in time, looking at a little history, or taking a tour down memory lane, check out these back issues of Jet, particularly when it called itself the “Weekly Negro News Magazine” — it apparently dropped that little title in June of 1954.