Lerone Bennett, Jr.

Lerone Bennett Jr.
Lerone Bennett in 1973. Photo by John H. White.
Born	(1928-10-17) October 17, 1928 (age 88) Clarksdale, Mississippi, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Writer, Author, Scholar, & Social Historian
Years active	1949-present
Known for	books Before the Mayflower (1962) and Forced into Glory (2000)

Lerone Bennett Jr. (born October 17, 1928) is an African-American scholar, author and social historian, known for his analysis of race relations in the United States. His best-known works include Before the Mayflower (1962) and Forced into Glory (2000), a book about U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.

Bennett was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi on October 17, 1928, the son of Lerone Bennett Sr. and Alma Reed. When he was young, his family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, the capital. He attended segregated schools as a child under the state system.

Bennett graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. He has noted this time was integral to his intellectual development. He also joined the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.

After graduate studies, Bennett became a journalist for the Atlanta Daily World in 1949, continuing until 1953. He also served as city editor for JET magazine from 1952-53. It had been founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, who first founded its parent magazine, Ebony, that year.

In 1953, Bennett became associate editor for Ebony Magazine, serving as executive editor beginning in 1958. He served for decades as editors of this prominent magazine. It has served as his base for the publication of a steady stream of articles on African-American history, with some collected and published as books.

He was noted in 1954 for his article, "Thomas Jefferson's Negro Grandchildren," about the 20th-century lives of individuals claiming descent from Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. It brought black oral history into the public world of journalism and published histories. This relationship was long denied by Jefferson's daughter and two of her children, and main line historians relied on their account. But new works published in the 1970s and 1990s challenged that position. Since a 1998 DNA study demonstrated a match between an Eston Hemings descendant and the Jefferson male line, the historic consensus has shifted (including the position of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello) to acknowledging that Jefferson likely had a 38-year relationship with Hemings and was the father of all her six children of record, four of whom survived to adulthood.