He captured the zeitgeist of the black baby boomers and led the shift from “Negro” to “black.” His books brimmed with militant black people who questioned the promise of America and protested their treatment, displacing the patient, patriotic Negroes who longed for citizenship. The following year brought Pioneers in Protest.īennett was much more than a popularizer. He told the story of the first blacks to exercise political power in Black Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction 1867–1877 in 1967. Historian Benjamin Quarles noted “its unusual ability to evoke the tragedy and the glory of the Negro’s role in the American past.” In 1964, Bennett wrote a biography of his Morehouse classmate: What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King. In 1961, amid the Civil Rights Movement, Bennett authored a popular black history series in Ebony that became the basis for his general history, Before the Mayflower (1962). With a circulation that peaked at 2 million, Johnson’s Ebony and his book division made Bennett’s works common in black homes.ĭuring the 1960s, Johnson’s editor became the black community’s historian. Johnson underwrote the journalist’s historical ambitions.
Bennett’s close relationship with company owner John H. He worked first for Jet and then for Ebony, becoming the executive editor in 1958. After serving in the Korean War, he began his career at the Atlanta Daily World, but before long joined Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago. A revisionist historian was born.Īt Morehouse College, Bennett majored in history, graduating in 1949. His love of history took a serious turn when he discovered a volume of Lincoln’s writings and speeches that challenged the image of the Great Emancipator. An avid black reader in the age of white supremacy, he had the good fortune of finding a white used-book seller who allowed him to read when the store was closed. Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, he and his family moved to Jackson when he was young.
passed away on February 14, 2018, at age 89. The historian and journalist Lerone Bennett Jr.
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