Lerone Bennett Jr.

Bennett was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, on October 17, 1928, the son of Lerone Bennett Sr. and Alma Reed. When he was young, his family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, the capital. His father worked as a chauffeur and his mother was a maid but they divorced when he was a child. At twelve he began writing for The Mississippi Enterprise, a Jackson, Mississippi, black owned paper. He recalled once getting in trouble for being distracted from an errand when he happened upon a newspaper to read. He attended segregated schools as a child under the state system, and graduated from Lanier High School.[1] Bennett attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was classmates with Martin Luther King Jr. Graduating in 1949, Bennett recalled that this period was integral to his intellectual development. He also joined the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.

Bennett served as a soldier during the Korean War, and later pursued graduate studies. He was a journalist for the Atlanta Daily World from 1949 until 1953. He also worked as city editor for JET magazine from 1952 to 1953.[2] The magazine had been established in 1945 by John H. Johnson, who founded its parent magazine, Ebony, that same year. In 1953, Bennett became associate editor of Ebony magazine and then executive editor from 1958. The magazine served as his base for the publication of series of articles on African-American history. Some were collected and published as books.

Bennett wrote a 1954 article "Thomas Jefferson's Negro Grandchildren",[3] about the 20th-century lives of individuals claiming descent from Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. It brought black oral history into the public world of journalism and published histories. This relationship was long denied by Jefferson's daughter and two of her children, and mainline historians relied on their account. But new works published in the 1970s and 1990s challenged the conventional story. Since a 1998 DNA study demonstrated a match between an Eston Hemings descendant and the Jefferson male line, the historic consensus has shifted (including the position of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello) to acknowledging that Jefferson likely had a 38-year relationship with Hemings and fathered all six of her children of record, four of whom survived to adulthood.[4][5]

External video
Booknotes interview with Bennett on Forced Into Glory, September 10, 2000, C-SPAN
Panel discussion on Forced Into Glory, September 24, 2000, C-SPAN

Bennet served as a visiting professor of history at Northwestern University.[6] He authored several books, including multiple histories of the African-American experience. These include his first work, Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, 1619–1962 (1962), which discusses the contributions of African Americans in the United States from its earliest years. His 2000 book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, questions Abraham Lincoln's role as the "Great Emancipator". This last work was described by one reviewer as a "flawed mirror."[7] It was criticized by historians of the Civil War period, such as James McPherson and Eric Foner.[8] Bennett is credited with the phrase: "Image Sees, Image Feels, Image Acts," meaning the images that people see influence how they feel, and ultimately how they act.

A longtime resident of Kenwood, Chicago, Bennett died of natural causes at his home there on 14 February 2018, aged 89.[6]