March 5, 2018
Remembering Lerone Bennett, Jr. Master Journalist, Master Historian, Master Teacher
By A. Peter Bailey
Lerone Bennett
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Brilliant journalist/historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., who died at age 89 on February 14, 2018, in numerous Ebony magazine articles and books, made Black History come alive to millions of people in the United States and throughout the world. It is almost prophetic that the great historian died in the middle of Black History Month.
During my eight years working in Ebony's New York City office and at several conferences of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, I had an opportunity to personally talk to and closely listen to the wisdom that he abundantly provided. When it came to Black History, Lerone was a Master Teacher. He always spoke calmly but emphatically when exposing the outright lies that we had been told about American history, especially when it came to black folks. I know at least a dozen people who became history-lovers after reading one of Lerone's books or hearing him speak.
In the introductions or prefaces Lerone informs readers, the motivation for each of his books. They include the following:
1. Before the Mayflower: The History of the Negro in America (1962)
The quote is from the 1964 revised edition. "This is a history of 'the other America' and what happened to them when they got here. The story begins in Africa with the great empires of the Sudan and Nile Valley and ends with the Second Reconstruction which Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 'sit-in' generation are fashioning in the North and South...."
2. The Negro Mood (1964)
"In five essays organized around the general theme, the Negro Mood, I have attempted to dig beneath the surface and expose the psychic mechanisms of the Black fury that is rolling across the land."
3. Confrontation: Black and White (1965)
"The Negro rebellion is a classic example of the confrontation of blacks and whites as symbols and as presences. This epochal event, which is beginning not ending, is unfolding on several levels..."
4. Black Power U.S.A: The Human Side of Reconstruction 1867-1877 (1967)
"The history of this period has been a matter of extreme controversy for several decades. Until quite recently, most white historians denounced the 'Africanization' of the South as a 'soul-sickening spectacle' of 'military despotism,' 'graft' and 'inefficiency.' Woodrow Wilson, to cite only one example, was appalled by the whole era and wrote scathingly of the former slaves as a "host of dusty children untimely out of school. Within recent years, modern scholars, following the lead of W.E.B DuBois and other Negro historians, have proved conclusively that the works of Wilson and other conservative writers were white-oriented distortions of Reconstruction reality. I have attempted in this brief history to give wider currency to the findings of these scholars..."
5. Pioneers in Protest (1972)
Lerone didn't write a preface or introduction for this book but it includes the following: "For the modern pioneers and martyrs: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers."
6. The Challenge of Blackness (1972)
"The words were written and spoken in a variety of contexts. What holds them together is a common concern with the challenge of blackness as expressed most concretely in the the thrust of black people for political, economic, and cultural power."
7. The Shaping of Black America (1975)
"This is an essay towards a new understanding of the long and continuing attempts of African and African descendants to possess themselves and the new land. This essay is historical reconstruction grows, organically and chronologically out of an earlier book, Before the Mayflower. First of all and most important of all, this is developmental history instead of chronological history…."
8. Great Moments in Black History: Wade in the Water (1979)
"This book is an attempt to answer questions about central events in the shaping of black-white America. It is an attempt to view history from the inside and it is based, whenever possible, on the response of participants and contemporary observers. The book explores fifteen dramatic turning points from the first black national convention to the March on Washington..."
9. Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (2007)
"This is not a biography; this is a political study of the uses and abuses of biography and opinion and it suggests, among other things, that your identity, whatever your color, is based, at least in part, on what you think about Lincoln, the Civil War and slavery. Lincoln or somebody said once that you can't fool all of the people all of the time. By turning a racist who wanted to deport all Blacks into a national symbol of integration and brotherhood, the Lincoln myth-makers have managed to prove Lincoln or whoever said it wrong. This is the story of how they fooled all of the people all of the time and why."
Finally, another major contribution of the Master Teacher is the article "Why Black History is Important to You" in the February 1981 Ebony. It includes the immortal observation that "the past is a bet that your fathers placed that you must now cover."
Say Amen somebody. Thanks Brother Lerone.