Lerone Bennett Jr.

Lerone Bennett Jr. was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, on the seventeenth of October 1928. He took his undergraduate degree at Morehouse College in 1949, was a classmate of Martin Luther King Jr., and entered journalism through the Atlanta Daily World.

He joined Johnson Publishing Company in 1953 and served as Executive Editor of Ebony magazine from 1958 to 2005 — forty-seven years. Ebony was, throughout his tenure, the most widely circulated Black-readership publication in American history; the magazine's print circulation peaked at over two million subscribers in the 1980s, with a multi-generational household readership several times that figure.

Bennett used the Ebony platform to write history. His serialized columns and feature articles — supplemented by his own books — produced the most widely read Black historical writing of the second half of the twentieth century. His Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, first published in 1962, has remained continuously in print for sixty-two years across six successive editions and has sold over a million copies.

His most controversial work, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (2000), argued that Lincoln's commitment to emancipation was conditional and reluctant — a thesis sharply contested by the Lincoln-historiography mainstream but increasingly engaged in subsequent scholarship.

He was Distinguished Professor of History at Chicago State University, served as Senior Editor at Johnson Publishing through his last decade, and received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2003.

He died in Chicago on the fourteenth of February 2018, age eighty-nine.

He is honored here as the historian whose Ebony platform taught two generations of Black readers their history.