Pioneers in Protest

Lerone Bennett Jr. was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi on October 17, 1928. By the age of 12, he was writing for the black newspaper The Mississippi Enterprise. He graduated from Morehouse College in 1949 and went to work at the black newspaper Atlanta Daily World. In 1953, he became an associate editor at Jet magazine. He moved to Ebony a year later and became the senior editor there in 1958. He eventually became an executive editor and worked for the magazine into his 80s. He wrote several books including Before the Mayflower, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King Jr., The Shaping of Black America, and Black Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction, 1867-1877. He died from advanced vascular dementia on February 14, 2018 at the age of 89.