Lerone Bennett

Lerone Bennett Jr., who wrote influential books on African-American history and resilience and chronicled key events in the civil rights movement as a journalist and top editor at Ebony magazine, has died at 89 in Chicago. Young Lerone grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. He worked on the student newspaper at Lanier High School. He went on to edit the Morehouse University student newspaper. In 1949, Mr. Bennett became a reporter for the Atlanta Daily World. He joined Jet magazine, and later, Ebony, the creation of Johnson Publishing founder John H. Johnson. After 1960s protests at Northwestern University to advance black-history studies, the university brought Mr. Bennett on as a visiting professor. In the 1980s, he served on the Chicago Public Library board. He was a friend to Illinois poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American to win the Pulitzer prize for poetry. His wife Gloria, a Jet journalist who covered the story of Emmett Till’s lynching, died in 2009. His son Lerone Bennett III died in 2013. He is survived by his daughters Joy T. Bennett, Courtney Jean Bennett and Constance Joan Bennett and three grandchildren.