Essence has served as a complex meditation on Black life, and specifically Black women, for 55 years. The publication has grown to unimaginable heights including Essence 360, their newest venture into technology, and Essence Fest, a culture and music festival hosted in New Orleans.
Editor-in-Chief Emerita Susan L. Taylor and Chief Content Officer Michele Ghee reflected on the publication’s evolving presence in its readers’ lives, the importance of spiritual wellness, and the publication’s economic commitment to New Orleans.
Essence plays a major role in the representation of Black people in culture and media. What is the brand’s responsibility in this evolving media landscape against the backdrop of the Trump administration threatening DEI across industries?
Susan L. Taylor: Essence centered Black women, and that’s the mission and the mandate. We did it beautifully and boldly, and that continues today. Before Essence, before 1970, there really was no national publication dedicated to and directly celebrating Black women, and looking at our lives with any measure of reverence and relevance. Of course, we read Ebony and JET so we would know what was happening in our nation with our people, but what Essence did was it celebrated our skin tones, our hair textures. There was fashion and it centered Black designers. It moved in the lives of Black women in a way that nothing had before.
The rollback and DEI is affecting us. What has always made Essence so relevant and important to not just Black women, but to the community, is it bridged all the things that we really are interested in, the things that are really central to us.
Yes, we love fashion, we love beauty, we love style—we love all of that. But we also know that there’s a social cause that has always got to be connected to our communication with our community. Essence really bridged all the things that are of interest and importance to Black women and gave us a voice that we did not have.
Michele Ghee: 55 years later, we still need that same voice. We know that the Black woman is on her screen 60 hours a week. My number one goal in creating content right now is to make sure we’re fueling her progress. How are we helping her become the woman that God created her to be? That’s what Susan started.
Congratulations on the release of Essence’s newest app, Essence 360! How will the app be used to continue to provide diverse storytelling and community to Black women?
Michele: It is not only a way for us to provide content, but for us to provide services. For instance, we are planning to have job opportunities that [the Essence woman] can only find there. We'll also have streaming services there as we're trying to aggregate and make it easy for her to access information that's gonna make her better. That’s critically important today, and we're working really hard to make that possible. We are also creating a social feed so that she can build community in the app.
How did that relationship between the publication and the city of New Orleans start?
Susan: It started with [former mayor of New Orleans] Marc Morial’s presence. He knew Essence, he knew our founders, and he opened the way for Essence to enter the city. And we thought that for our 25th anniversary, it was just a one off thing we would do. It became the meeting place, the Holy ground, the family reunion spot, the place where people would come together. The economic impact has grown to something that I don’t think anybody could have ever imagined, and it’s phenomenal.
Michele: Over $340 million is left [after Essence Fest 2025] in the city of New Orleans that stimulates that economy. Approximately 50,000 people walked through the doors every day to a free event in a time where we shouldn’t have to pay for everything. There was 21,000 minutes of programming from the different stages, 200 small businesses were elevated, and over 400 panels. What we’re able to do goes beyond dollars and cents.
I saw sisterhood in such a special way. I just saw people meeting and commuting and loving up on one another. There is value in that in a time where we need to be elevated because we're not being invited to the table, our voices aren’t being heard. I can go to New Orleans and get fed to go back out into the world to do what I need to do.
It’s the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which launched Essence CARE [now National CARES]. We also had an opportunity to honor that from the stage. How do we celebrate family and remember that we need to give back to community? Susan and the company have created a pipeline for us to do just that.
Susan, your faith was definitely displayed at the forefront of your time at Essence with your “In The Spirit” musings. How did your spiritual wellness journey evolve while building your career?
Susan: Well unfortunately, very often, our growth emerges from pain. That certainly is how “In the Spirit” began. It was a low point in my life. I actually thought I was having a heart attack and I ended up sitting in the back of a church after leaving a hospital and realizing it wasn't a heart attack that I was having. It was an anxiety attack.
And I heard a sermon that changed my life. The minister said that God is alive in you, and I grew up Catholic, so to me, the nuns and the priests had the direct line to God. There was nothing sacred about us as human beings. But sometimes you have to be in a place of pain in order to really hear what the spirit, by whatever name you call it, is trying to instill in you. And the next morning, rather than getting up and pulling the covers over my head and saying, ‘I can't do it,’ or living in fear, I just decided to listen, to be still.
So that's really what, “In The Spirit”, taught me and what I tried to share almost in every one of my writings. Not just about spirits, not just about sitting on a mountaintop in lotus position, staying in prayer, or being in the sanctuary. We are the sanctuary. So writing “In the Spirit” was my way of remembering that, reminding myself of why I was created, why we were created, and then sharing that with those who were interested in reading.
Do you have any words of wisdom for Black women trying to find sisterhood while navigating the difficult media industry?
Michele: My sisterhood with Susan, I hope, is a shining example of what sisterhood means. I’m not going to believe the lie that says there’s only room for one. I’ve heard it so many times. What I implore every sister to do is to understand that they have the power to hire somebody, promote somebody, fight for somebody. If I leave and nobody takes my spot or nobody’s trained to do what I do, then I have literally failed. Essence is the essence of what we do and that is to make sure we’re taking care of the next generation of sisterhood.
