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From its launch in 1945, Ebony magazine was politically and socially influential. However, the magazine also played an important role in educating millions of African Americans about their past. Guided by the pen of Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine’s senior editor and in-house historian Ebony became a key voice in the popular black history revival that flourished after World War II. Its content helped push representations of the African American past from the margins to the center of the nation’s cultural and political imagination.

​This fresh and fascinating exploration of Ebony’s political, social, and historical content illuminates the intellectual role of the iconic magazine and its contribution to African American scholarship.

PRAISE FOR EBONY MAGAZINE AND LERONE BENNETT JR.: POPULAR BLACK HISTORY IN POSTWAR AMERICA...

A well-researched and accessible study situated within the growing field of Black intellectual history, Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. is a major contribution to our understanding of what West aptly calls 'popular Black history'
 - Pero Dagbovie. Editor of the Journal of African American History
Expertly chronicles how Ebony magazine...shaped cultural perception of African American history
 - Publisher's Weekly
The influential sociologist E. Franklin Frazier discouraged scholarly interest in Ebony during the 1950s by characterizing it as a nihilistic enterprise...Only recently have historians like Adam Green, Brenna Wynn Greer, Jonathan Scott Holloway, Christopher Tinson and E. James West offered a more nuanced view...The new historical studies show that Ebony, and Johnson Publishing generally, played a vital role in redefining how corporate America viewed blackness and how African-Americans saw themselves...as British historian West shows in his forthcoming book Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine helped to move African-American history from the margins to the very center of American life
 - Brent Staples. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New York Times editorialist
© E. James West, 2019