There is a striking, commanding photo of Lerone Bennett, Jr. on the cover of his book . His expression is probing, a pipe fixed rigidly in his mouth, and he seems to dare you to question his intellectual prowess and power. Bennett, whose journalistic style made his articles accessible to the masses and his research of African American history gave him respect among scholars, died Tuesday, Feb. 13, in Chicago. He was 89.
Bennett, according to several sources close to him, had been suffering for years from a form of dementia.
“He was an activist scholar,” said poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti of Chicago, who is among a coterie of writers influenced by Bennett’s books and articles, particularly during his years at Ebony Magazine. “Lerone grounded us with a sense of struggle and with a commitment to speak truth to power.”
His fascination with words, Bennett often told reporters, began early in his life coming of age in Mississippi. He grew up in Jackson, but was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi on Oct. 17, 1928. That love for words quickly found print during high school where he worked on the student newspaper and they gained profundity when he edited the student newspaper at Morehouse College.
Bennett was always proud of recounting his days at Morehouse where among his fellow students was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1970, two years after Dr. King’s assassination, Bennett was among speakers at the first annual meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center in Atlanta. He said of his former classmate that Dr. King “showed us what man can be, what man should be, and what man must be. And we are here tonight to institutionalize that gift so others can see and hear and be saved.”
From Morehouse, Bennett found employment at the Atlanta Daily World before settling in at Johnson Publications and Ebony where he would spend 50 productive years of journalism.
When Johnson Publication released his “Before the Mayflower—A History of Black America” in 1962, Bennett gained wider recognition, and soon his footprint was firmly established in academia where the book was a vital source in countless number of Black Studies Programs and classes. It also propelled Bennett from behind his desk and into the midst of the civil rights and the Black power movements.
The list of his books after Before the Mayflower all bristled with Bennett’s unflinching provocation, his interest in African American history, none more notable than The Negro Mood, Confrontation: Black and White, Black Power, USA, and The Challenge of Blackness. It was in the latter book that Bennett laid down his mantra “If Black people are not what white people said they were, then white America is not what it claims to be. What we have to deal with here therefore is a contestation at the level of reality. We are engaged in a struggle over meaning, in a struggle over the truth.”
Toward the end of his activist journalist days, Bennett turned his attention to dealing with some of the nation’s “truths,” including those centered on the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. As was his wont—and he had stirred a swirl of controversy in the early sixties with his claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered Black descendants—Bennett took on another American icon in his book Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000) that questioned Lincoln’s fame as the “Great Emancipator.” This view continues to be a thorny discussion among historians.
What is not controversial is Bennett’s standing among writers who admired his steely resolve, his lyrical prose that brought a number of unheralded freedom fighters back to historical memory.
In a poem dedicated to Bennett and to Hoyt Fuller, another editor who toiled in the Johnson vineyards, Madhubuti captured the essence of these now departed brothers in “Afrikan Men”:
“there is a certain steel-ness about you
the way u set the vision & keep it
the way u view the world & warn us
the coming tomorrows the limited memory of what was
the image the reflection the realness of what is to be.”
That realness, steel-ness embodied Bennett’s work, and his progeny is more than the blood relatives who mourn his passing.
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