Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr

Ebony Magazine, founded in 1945, became arguably the leading Black-owned publication in history. Although other scholars have studied the history of the magazine, founded by John H. Johnson under the umbrella of the Johnson Publishing Company, E. James West narrows the focus to how Ebony popularized Black history for its readers in the postwar United States, and how Lerone Bennett Jr., the eventual senior editor, was the centerpiece for the historical endeavor. West maintains that Ebony's role as an outlet for Black historical information has been “underexplored.”West argues that Ebony was inspired by Life magazine, a photojournalistic periodical. However, Ebony took on an additional role with historical articles on Black achievements since Black history had been omitted or misrepresented, especially in public school textbooks. The Ebony historical articles formed a counternarrative to the negative racial stereotypes in popular and political cultures. Although Johnson had also published Negro Digest, “an equivalent to the Reader's Digest,” which later was named the Black World, the articles in Ebony reached a larger market.West's main goal is to show how Ebony with the help of Bennett made Black history popular for its readers. Hired in 1958, Bennett was an “in-house” historian who wrote several Black history series, such as “The Making of Black America,” and some of the articles were developed into a book. Ebony provided Bennett with the platform to be a popular historian and the Johnson Publishing Company published Bennett's books, starting with Before the Mayflower. These works made Bennett a legitimate “popular” historian, one outside the halls of academia, a fact West stresses in demonstrating Bennett's historical influence.West argues that Ebony's approach to Black history changed over time, mainly due to Bennett, who decided to create a living history by looking at the first Reconstruction (after the Civil War) while the Civil Rights Movement, dubbed the Second Reconstruction, was in progress, relating the two periods as parallel developments. Moreover, West asserts that Bennett began to write “Black Power” history as the phrase highlighted a shift in the Civil Rights Movement. He analyzes the tension between a “radical” or “militant” approach to history and the fact that Ebony relied on consumer advertisement and consumer culture. Although entertainers were typically highlighted on the cover—a shrewd marketing technique—the magazine also covered success in other professions from sports to medicine. West examines the criticism of this format although he could have argued in greater detail that Ebony was not an academic journal even though it did publish historical articles. Instead, as a popular magazine, Ebony was able to reach more people with their historical articles than academic journals could ever hope to reach. It was somewhat naive to think that Ebony might drop the strategy that created its success.West does not discuss Ebony's approach to Black history in a vacuum but within the context of Black history becoming popular within the academic circles, especially in higher education with the push for Black studies departments or programs. Some white historians, even revisionists, began to look differently at Black history. Most of the historians, Black or white, were men, and they largely worked to uplift the Black male in history, while ignoring Black women, or writing as if there had been no gender differences between them. West notes the gender bias in the Black history series, which focused mostly on males, and how the women's movement and gay pride movement created discussions about gender which had been ignored.In addition to various other sources, West uses letters to the editor to convey an idea of how readers responded to the Black History series and the special issues. These were generally positive, applauding Ebony's effort in presenting Black history, so conspicuously absent from history texts in schools, in which there was no effort to present Black achievements as a positive force in US history.Ebony was not only read by Black Americans but also by some white readers since it was often the token Black magazine in white establishments. Along with its Black history coverage, Ebony also covered the modern Civil Rights and Black Power movements as journalism, which made Ebony a historical source in itself. Whether those in academia have accepted Ebony as a legitimate historical source to the degree they accept newspapers and news magazines or other popular periodicals is a separate question. But Johnson forged ahead. Published in four volumes in the early 1970s, The Ebony Pictorial History of Black Americans, for which Bennett wrote the introduction, became the Black history encyclopedia for many Black homes. The Negro Handbook, published in 1966, provides additional evidence for Ebony's commitment to Black history. West also looks at a particular aspect of the company's history, which can be a model for additional projects, narrowing the focus to a particular magazine feature.This study of popular Black history is timely since some school boards are now removing books about race in a fight over the teaching of “critical race theory” in schools. For example, in 2021 Texas lawmakers passed a law to keep topics that make students “feel discomfort” out of Texas classrooms. This parallels the need for Black popular history that prevailed when Ebony first appeared in 1945. West's work bridges these struggles and provides a thorough understanding of the historiography of the Johnson Publishing Company

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