Lerone Bennett Jr.

Lerone Bennett Jr. was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, on the seventeenth of October 1928, and came of age in Jackson, where the segregated South both bound and sharpened him. He carried his gifts to Morehouse College in Atlanta, taking his undergraduate degree in 1949 among a generation that included his classmate Martin Luther King Jr., both of them shaped by the college's president, Benjamin E. Mays. From there he stepped directly into the working press, reporting for the Atlanta Daily World.

In the early 1950s the Johnson Publishing Company drew him north to Chicago. He served first at Jet as city editor, then joined Ebony, rising to executive editor and remaining bound to the enterprise for more than half a century. From that perch he reached millions, making the long and dignified sweep of Black history a subject of the American mainstream rather than a footnote to it.

His enduring monument in print is Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, which first appeared in 1962 and carried the story of a people back beyond the founding myths of the nation. He wrote widely and boldly across the decades, including a study of Martin Luther King Jr. and, later, the searching and controversial Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream. His labors drew the Carter G. Woodson lifetime honor and honorary degrees from many institutions.

Lerone Bennett Jr. died in Chicago on the fourteenth of February 2018, at eighty-nine. He gave a people back the fullness of their past, and in doing so gave a nation a truer account of itself. May his name be spoken with honor.