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Beverly Johnson, 23, approaches movies with less fretting. She is one of the top models, "not just the biggest top black model," earning more than $100,000 a year. Beverly is a lithe bronze beauty with the poise of a pedigreed Abyssinian cat. She beams with soft radiance. Five years ago, she dropped out of Boston's Northeastern University after making Glamour's cover at her first try. "Black models then looked like they were going to attack you," says Beverly. "Black women couldn't respond to them at all." When Beverly became the first black on Vogue's cover last August, thousands of her sisters wrote in, "Right on, sister. Show them we can have taste and be natural."
She has become a focus for young blacks. She gives time to such charities as Africare and the Atlanta Black Education Fund, which recently held a Beverly Johnson Day. She is about to launch a line of cosmetics for black women because "we've never been taught how to take care of ourselves."
As a teen-ager from a middle-class family in Buffalo, Beverly's ambition was to make the U.S. swimming team for the 1968 Olympics (she missed by a splash). But now other opportunities are opening up. This year she is concentrating on singing and acting in preparation for a Hollywood screen test, and last year she appeared on-screen for the first time in Land of Negritude, a documentary about an American who returns to Africa. On location at Senegal's Island of Gorée, from which slaves were shipped to America, she was for the first time moved by her heritage. "Maybe my grandmother was there." The President of Senegal, the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, had other ideas. Bowled over by her beauty, he wrote two poems in her honor and proclaimed, "The Queen of Sheba is here before me."