Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America

E. James West’s Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett, Popular Black History in Postwar America presents the first detailed examination of senior editor Lerone Bennett Jr., revealing the crucial role he played in popularizing and complementing professional historical research and how he endorsed and recovered the history of Black America for Ebony magazine. West’s scholarship is a much-needed contribution to the Black intellectual historiography as it builds upon previous works by contending and demonstrating Bennett as a nationally recognized expert in Black history rather than, as was seen by other scholars, “a subservient to professionally trained historians” (7). West’s manuscript is divided into six core thematic chapters, chronologically spanning from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. The author takes as his starting point Ebony’s mandate to celebrate the Black past, arguing that this was not new but expanded upon the efforts of traditional Black outlets such as Freedom Journal. He shows that while these newspapers endorsed Black history as an essential conduit for African Americans to forge an image of respectability and righteousness, they often lacked the standard quality needed to disseminate the gospel of Black history. West illuminates the apparent discrepancy between the limited number of professional Black historians and Black outlets in popularizing and professionalizing Black history. This laid the groundwork for future editors such as Lerone Bennett Jr. to position himself as a popular historian in producing Black history within Ebony. The next chapter delves into Bennett’s early career as an editor for Ebony and a popular historian, demonstrating that upon his arrival to Ebony, “Bennett exerted an immediate influence over the magazine’s historical content, employing an understating of black history as a ‘living history’” (27). Here, the author sheds light on Bennett’s major publications in Ebony and externally in the early 1960s, including The Negro History special feature, which endorsed an Afrocentric approach and emphasized a diverse slave resistance history during the antebellum era, and his new account Before the Mayflower, a book-length adaptation of his series. West illustrates that through his output, Bennett sought to develop “a more historiographical and critically incisive perspective” rather than just recovering “the lost histories of black life and culture” (35). It was the scholarly insight of his publications, West underscores, and the readers’ and the critics’ acclaim that gave Bennett a reputation as a leading historian in the absence of professional training. The manuscript’s most significant chapter, “White Problems and the Roots of Black Power” details the manner by which Bennett reflected the socioeconomic concerns of Black Americans in the mid-1960s