Bennett, Lerone Jr.

Impact on the world

Bennett’s Ebony series on Black history, developed into the bestselling Before the Mayflower in 1962, brought centuries of African American history to a mass popular audience for the first time through a mainstream Black magazine rather than an academic press. His 1954 article “Thomas Jefferson’s Negro Grandchildren” gave national attention decades early to oral histories of Jefferson’s descendants through Sally Hemings, and his 1964 What Manner of Man was among the first biographies of Martin Luther King Jr. published in King’s lifetime. His 2000 book Forced into Glory, which argued Abraham Lincoln’s racial views have been oversimplified into the “Great Emancipator” myth, drew sharp criticism from Civil War historians but cemented Bennett’s reputation as a provocative popular historian unafraid of received wisdom, coining the phrase “Image Sees, Image Feels, Image Acts” to describe media’s power over Black self-perception.

Life & background

Born October 17, 1928, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and raised in Jackson after his family moved there, Bennett began writing for the Black-owned Mississippi Enterprise at age twelve and graduated from Morehouse College, where he was a classmate of Martin Luther King Jr. After Army service during the Korean War, he worked as a reporter and city editor for the Atlanta Daily World from 1949 to 1953, then joined Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago as Jet’s city editor before moving to Ebony as associate editor in 1953 and executive editor from 1958, a post he held for roughly three decades. A longtime resident of Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood, Bennett married Gloria Sylvester in 1956, authored a dozen books, and died of complications from vascular dementia at his Chicago home on February 14, 2018, at age 89.

Sources

1. Zinn Education Project; EBSCO Research Starters; Encyclopedia.com