E. James West - Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America

Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.

Popular Black History in Postwar America

E. JAMES WEST

2020 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved

Frontispiece: Lerone Bennett Jr. in his office at the Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago, 1973. Photo courtesy of the National Archives, Environmental Protection Agency.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: West, E. James, author.

Title: Ebony magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. : popular black history in postwar America / E. James West.

Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019032960 (print) | LCCN 2019032961 (ebook) | ISBN 9780252043116 (cloth) | ISBN 9780252084980 (paperback) | ISBN 9780252051999 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Ebony (Chicago, Ill.)History. | Bennett, Lerone, Jr., 1928-2018. | JournalistsUnited StatesBiography. | African American journalistsBiography. | HistoriansUnited StatesBiography. | African American historiansBiography.

Classification: LCC PN 4900. E 34 W 47 2020 (print) | LCC PN 4900. E 34 (ebook) | DDC 051dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032960

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032961

To Candi

T hanks to Dawn Durante, the University of Illinois Press, and my anonymous readers for dragging this project toward a semblance of respectability.

Thanks to the inimitable Eithne Quinn.

Thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Association of American Studies, Duke University, the Eccles Center for American Studies at the British Library, Emory University, the Fulbright Commission, the Hagley Museum and Library, Historians of the Twentieth Century United States, the Leverhulme Trust, the Library of Congress, Northumbria University, the United States Embassy in London, the University of Chicago, the University of Manchester, and other institutions and organizations which have financially supported this project.

Thanks to friends, colleagues, and correspondents Joy Bennett, Tom Bishop, Timuel Black, Simeon and Carol Booker, Onyema Bright, David Brown, Nathan Cardon, Rod Clare, Beverly Cook, Alex Cooke, Julie Devonald, Andrew Fearnley, Doug Field, Cynthia Fife-Townsel, Raquel Flores-Clemons, Marnia Gardner, Nick Grant, Josh Gulam, Aaisha Haykal, Laretta Henderson, Barbara Karant, Sam and Emma Kulabowila, Colin Lago, Carol Lockman, Katie McGettigan, Anita Mechler, Shayna Mehas, Ethan Michaeli, E. Ethelbert Miller, Amani Morrison, Saima Nasar, Robert and Susie Newton, Jackie Ould, Hannah Parker, Hannah Proctor, Lori Ramos, Ben Reed, Mary-Lou Reker, Will Riddington, Sarah El Sheikh, Ruth Tait, Amy Tobin, Mark Walmsley, Brian Ward, Christine White, Janine Wilson, Nick Witham, Annie Nonya Wonsey, and John Woodford.

Thanks to my family.

Thanks to Skye for keeping me company. Youre the worst, but youre ok.

Thanks to Candice Gregory-Thomas, my partner in crime and everything else.

Portions of were previously published as The Books Youve Waited For: Ebony Magazine, the Johnson Book Division, and Black History in Print, in Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print, edited by Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), 6282; Power Is 100 Years Old: Lerone Bennett, Jr., Ebony Magazine and the Roots of Black Power. The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 9 (2016): 16588; A Hero to Be Remembered: Ebony Magazine, Critical Memory and the Real Meaning of the King Holiday, Journal of American Studies 52 (2018): 50327.

An overview of Bennetts career addressing some of the main themes and ideas of this book was published as Lerone Bennett, Jr.: A Life in Popular Black History, The Black Scholar 47 (2017): 317.

Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.

I n the June 1969 issue of Ebony, its editors used the popular Backstage feature to invite readers on a literary tour through the Chicago offices of parent company Johnson Publishing.

When read in isolation, the Buried Afro-American History brochure could be dismissed as one of many marketing ploys used by publisher John H. Johnson to reinforce Ebony s status as the most widely read black magazine in the world.

Such statements were foregrounded in the writing of senior editor Lerone Bennett Jr., who oversaw the development of Ebony s historical content following his arrival at the magazine during the mid-1950s. As the companys in-house historian, Bennett authored scores of articles, series, and special features on black history for Ebony. His copy fed directly into more than a dozen books on black history and culture that were published between the early 1960s and the end of the twentieth centuryincluding texts such as The Challenge of Blackness and The Shaping of Black America, which sought to articulate a new conceptual envelope for black American history, and wildly popular studies such as Before the Mayflower, which remains one of the bestselling black history books of all time.

Despite its massive circulation, the breadth and depth of its black history content, and the mandate established by its publisher and expanded by its editors, Ebony s enormous influence as a history book has been largely overlooked. In turn, notwithstanding his enduring popularity and influence, Bennetts own career both inside and outside of Johnson Publishing has been routinely ignored. This book contributes to a correction of these scholarly oversights, presenting the first substantive analysis of Ebony s historical content, as well as the first in-depth examination of Bennetts career at Johnson Publishing and his emergence as a popular black historian. I focus here on the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, a period that scholars such as Pero Dagbovie and Robert Harris Jr. have contended marked black historys coming of age.

Since it first appeared on newsstands in November 1945, Ebony has endured as a voice and a symbol of African American upward mobility. Based on cash orders for its second issue, Ebony s editors already felt confident enough to anoint it as the biggest Negro magazine in the world in both size and circulation.

Over the past few decades, however, a diverse range of scholars have aimed to complicate the sentiments expressed by Frazier and other early critics of Ebony. While new studies acknowledge the limitations of the magazines middle-class consumerism and its celebration of celebrity culture, they have also noted its role in providing a counternarrative to negative black stereotypes in popular and political culture, and in championing the rise of the black consumer market. As Adam Green rightly observes in his 2007 study, Selling the Race, Ebony s classed politics of racial respectability did not negate, although certainly served to shape, its impact as an outlet for new visions of black urban modernity and group identity. Similarly, in Madison Avenue and the Color Line, Jason Chambers has emphasized the magazines role in establishing commercial power as a vital part of the ongoing struggle for civil, social, and political rights during the years following World War II.