Draft:Basil O. Phillips

Basil Oliphant Phillips (February 19, 1930 - August 27, 2007) was an American magazine editor. Phillips was Photo Editor for the Johnson Publishing Company, where he sourced, published, and preserved some of the most important moments in African-American history. Phillips helped to visually publish Black America in the country’s leading African American magazines.

Phillips was born in 1930 in Kansas City, Missouri, and attended Roosevelt University where he majored in business. He later attended the Illinois Institute of Technology to study visual design. Phillips spent 54 years at the Johnson Publishing Company, working on a number of notable African American magazines, including Ebony & Jet magazines. He presided over the twentieth-century’s largest photo collection of Black Americans, spanning over 1 million photographs.

Phillips was a pioneer in the Black book publishing industry. He was widely connected to the US book publishing and library industry, touring conventions across the country. In 1963, he commanded the Johnson Publishing Company Book Division, the first African American-owned publishing company of its kind. He oversaw widely acclaimed Black history publications such as Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett Jr. He was a long-standing member of the American Library Association and, during his early years there, was its only Black representative.

Phillips passed away in 2007 from diabetes.