Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.
Popular Black History in Postwar America
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From its launch in 1945, Ebony magazine was politically and socially influential. However, the magazine also played an important role in educating millions of African Americans about their past. Guided by the pen of Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine’s senior editor and in-house historian, Ebony became a key voice in the popular black history revival that flourished after World War II. Its content helped push representations of the African American past from the margins to the center of the nation’s cultural and political imagination.
E. James West’s fresh and fascinating exploration of Ebony’s political, social, and historical content illuminates the intellectual role of the iconic magazine and its contribution to African American scholarship. He also uncovers a paradox. Though Ebony provided Bennett with space to promote a militant reading of black history and protest, the magazine’s status as a consumer publication helped to mediate its representation of African American identity in both past and present.
Mixing biography, cultural history, and popular memory, West restores Ebony and Bennett to their rightful place in African American intellectual, commercial, and political history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian West expertly chronicles how Ebony magazine and its executive editor Lerone Bennett Jr. shaped cultural perception of African-American history. He illustrates how Ebony evolved from its 1945 launch as an aspirational celebrity magazine to become a chronicle for commentary on current events in the 1960s, such as the Black Power movement and MLK's assassination. Bennett joined the magazine in 1953 and was promoted to executive five years later; each month the magazine featured Bennett's political columns, in which his iconoclastic points of view on figures such as Nat Turner grew his scholarly stature to the point that he was made chair of the African-American History department at Northwestern University. Special editions of the magazine, such as its "Emancipation Proclamation" issue in 1963, served as markers of the magazine's maturity and gained it distribution in schools; meanwhile the magazine's book publishing arm grew in reputation with such controversial titles as 1963's Before the Mayflower. West's account of the magazine's trajectory offers insight as to how Ebony shaped the black experience in America through Bennett's columns, but unfortunately doesn't dig very deeply into the effects of the magazine's pop culture coverage. This astute history shines a welcome light on a pioneering journalist.
