Title: American Vogue's first black cover girl - BBC News
Headings: American Vogue's first black cover girl
American Vogue's first black cover girl
Another first
What happened next

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Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Lauren Hutton, Beverly Johnson, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell photographed in 1993
Then in August 1974 Vogue photographer Francesco Scavullo, photographed Johnson. She didn't know it at the time but it was a cover shoot. In those days, as a model, you didn't know you were going to be on the cover until the magazine went on sale. "Back then in New York the covers would be the banner all around the newsstand… I saw it and I just stopped in my tracks… Then I made a collect call to my mother on a payphone and told her, and I remember us just screaming and crying." A year later the editor of American Vogue, Grace Mirabella, was quoted in the New York Times magazine saying, "We don't think about it as a milestone, but we're very proud to have had her there." Johnson says she can understand why Vogue didn't acknowledge the significance of the picture. "It was almost an embarrassment to them in 1974 because Europe really took a stand against them saying 'It's about time you did that,'" she says. But she thinks the magazine still hasn't grasped the magnitude of what it did to change perceptions about race. "I don't think they understand the impact they had on a nation of women, that they could finally look at someone and say, 'She's me and she's in the magazine and she's beautiful and we're finally accepted in mainstream America.'" This point is regularly driven home to her even now, 40 years later.