How One Magazine Negotiated the Abyss Between Capitalism and Revolution

Abstract

How One Magazine Negotiated the Abyss Between Capitalism and Revolution Miglena Sternadori (bio) Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America. E. James West. University of Illinois Press, 2020. 208 pp. $24.95 paperback. The role of magazines in documenting and interpreting history has been aptly explored by Carolyn Kitch, in her 2005 book, Pages from the Past, and by other scholars who have attempted to map the complex intersection between journalism and memory. But magazines’ historical texts are not just about commemoration and nostalgia, as E. James West points out. If they reveal unknown or suppressed facts and stories, they can also serve as textbooks, propel advocacy, or spawn moneymaking ideas. Ebony, the general-interest magazine for middle-class African Americans, is a prime example and the object of West’s recent book, Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. In it West traces the contributions of Lerone Bennett Jr., a popular historian who supported the Black Power movement, to a magazine remembered for encouraging conspicuous consumption as a path to racial equality. How did such an unlikely marriage of philosophies survive? The answer lies, implicitly, in the ambivalent nature of the magazine medium, where progressive story lines often serve to ensure the advertising success of large corporations. Bennett, a Morehouse College classmate of Martin Luther King Jr., arrived at Ebony in 1954 and relentlessly published Black history articles and series until his entry into senior management in the late 1980s. Despite his lack of academic credentials, he conducted research like a professional historian, spending time in archives and finding primary documents. His efforts were rewarded. Long before universities had Black [End Page 113] studies departments and February was celebrated as Black History Month, readers wrote ecstatic letters to praise Bennett. His work—including series such as Negro History (later released as a book titled Before the Mayflower), Pioneers in Protest, The Making of Black America, and Black Power—filled some of the gaps in the whitewashed school curricula and historicized the struggle for civil rights. He depicted the richness of African heritage, the horrors of slavery, the ingenuities of Black resistance, and the achievements of Black politicians during Reconstruction. Publisher John Johnson was proud of Bennett’s contributions. Conveniently, their consciousness-raising nature was also useful in deflecting criticisms about Ebony’s apolitical and staunchly capitalist philosophy. For readers who had grown accustomed to reading Bennett’s articles in Ebony, it probably seemed natural in the 1970s to start to see advertisements from companies encouraging them to take leisure trips to Black-history monuments—or even to the South, which was presented as supposedly friendly and open to Black-heritage tourism. These ads appeared especially in the context of the celebration of the US bicentennial, in 1976. But although Bennett himself had helped usher Black history into the mainstream, he was livid about its capitalist co-optations. A number of his articles suggested that history was a tool of advocacy and even revolution, but these viewpoints, which reached wide audiences through the pages of Ebony, in no way stopped or discouraged profiteering from the cause he cared so deeply about. Despite these tensions over the uses of Black history, little changed. Johnson held steady to his capitalist course, while Bennett remained a trusted editor at the magazine—save for a brief, disappointing foray into academia to serve as the first chair of Northwestern University’s Black studies department. Over the years, many other thorny questions about the interpretation of history emerged at Ebony. For example, how was a “moderate” magazine supposed to cover radical activists such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael? Had Martin Luther King been an individualistic hero rallying for the cause of color blindness—as Ronald Reagan had framed him upon declaring his birthday a holiday—or a champion of racial consciousness and equality? Was MLK, in fact, a peaceful martyr or a true revolutionary? While Bennett may have had short-term wins by publishing articles containing some relatively radical viewpoints, in the long run, Johnson invariably steered the magazine’s ship toward more commemorative and middle-of-the-road perspectives. [End Page 114] The book is a useful read not only...