Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett Jr.

He did the kind of work that most historians say they want to do: for the public, accessible, and necessary for the public good. He wrote African American history for the masses-for African Americans, and for anyone else willing to give a powerfully written, and researched, history often at odds with how mainstream America remembered its past a fair shake. More than anything I can write here, that conversation was a testament to the legacy of Lerone Bennett. When Bennett’s death was announced several days ago, I thought back to that conversation. We all also recognized that he played an instrumental role in the popularization of African American history in the 1960s and 1970s, continuing in a longer tradition of African American historians who wrote for a black public hungry for knowledge. We all marveled at just how prolific Bennett was. Excitedly talking about our current research, one of them asked me a question about Lerone Bennett, Jr.-knowing that I’d written about him before, she wanted to pick my brain about his writings in relationship to public debates over history, memory, and the creation of knowledge for African Americans. –Lerone Bennett, “The Challenge of Blackness,” speech at first national conference, Black Studies Directors, Institute of the Black World, November, 1969.Ī few weeks ago, I was speaking with a few friends of mine in our history department here at the University of South Carolina.

For if truth, as Jean-Paul Sartre noted, is the perspective of the truly disinherited, then the black man is the truth or close to the truth. Which is another way of saying that blackness is a truth which stands at the center of the human experience, and that all who reflect the rays of that dazzling darkness reflect a truth which is close to the truth of man. For we see blackness in America merging with the blackness and the brownness of the Third World and becoming the world. This means that we are about the truth of this world. We are about the task of defining, defending, and illustrating blackness.

Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett Jr.