Intellectual Activism and the Historical Profession: Revisiting Lerone Bennett Jr.’s Ebony Years

Lerone Bennett, Jr., social historian, public historian and intellectual activist spent well over two decades at Ebony magazine, arguably the premier African American lifestyle magazine of the 20^th century. This essay seeks a reappraisal of his role as contributing editor, which brought to the magazine a sense of the importance of recovering and celebrating African American history and contributions to American society and the world. However, this author argues against the view that Bennett’s work was purely celebratory, preferring instead to interpret Bennett’s contributions as forms of critical popular education that cut across an increasingly volatile publishing industry and an aspirant black middle class. Additionally, the author credits Bennett with influencing the magazine’s attention to issues including African Americans’ relationship to and embrace of African independence and Afro-diasporic culture that embraced a wide range of trans-Atlantic intellectual and political concerns. Though such issues were taken up with force in the pages of another Johnson Publications outlet, Negro Digest/Black World, Bennett nonetheless was able to pique the interest of a more mainstream black reading public on a range of critical socio-political registers in the pages of Ebony, as well as in several other widely circulated published works. Lastly, this essay places Bennett’s oeuvre and contributions alongside scholars, bibliophiles, and lay historians such as Arthur A. Schomburg, Dorothy Porter, John Henrik Clarke, Hubert Harrison and others who made their careers outside the walls of the academy, yet whose contributions to the study of history remains foundational to African American Studies and the historical profession.