Bennett, Lerone Jr.
1928-2018 · Contribution: 1949-2005
Journalist and popular historian
Spent more than fifty years at Johnson Publishing Company’s Ebony magazine, rising to executive editor, and used its pages to publish groundbreaking popular history, above all Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (1962), that made him the era’s most widely read chronicler of the African American past
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Quick facts
- Born
- 1928, Clarksdale, Mississippi
- Active since
- 1949
- Category
- Press & Photography
- Best known for
- Executive editor of Ebony and author of Before the Mayflower
Impact on the world
Bennett made African American history popular, literally putting centuries of it on the coffee tables of millions of Black households, and helped shift the popular understanding of the American past long before such revisionism reached the mainstream.
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Sources
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Related visionaries
Thompson, Era Bell
1905-1986
Served as international editor of Ebony magazine for roughly two decades within a nearly 40-year career at Johnson Publishing Company, traveling to 124 countries and shaping the magazine’s global coverage of the African diaspora
Davis, Griffith Jerome
1923-1993
Became Ebony magazine’s first roving editor at Langston Hughes’s recommendation, then, as the only African American freelance photojournalist for the Black Star picture agency, chronicled the dawn of African independence in Liberia, Ethiopia, and Ghana before pioneering the racial integration of the U.S. Foreign Service
Hannah-Jones, Nikole
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Created The 1619 Project for The New York Times Magazine in 2019, a sweeping reexamination of slavery’s central role in the American founding and its ongoing legacy that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary and expanded into a bestselling book, school curriculum, and Hulu docuseries
Wilkerson, Isabel
1961-present
Became the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, awarded in 1994 for feature writing as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, and went on to author The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste, two of the most acclaimed and widely read works of American nonfiction of the twenty-first century