A Distinguished
Gentleman

“American scholarship has generally been conservative and mystifying in interpreting slavery, reconstruction and emancipation. I have tried to provide a new framework for examining these historical events, primarily by looking at them from the standpoint of the victims and not the slave masters or oppressors,” says Lerone Bennett Jr. who makes history come alive in his expose on Abraham Lincoln.

By Vincent F.A. Golphin

Lerone Bennett is more a conscience than a historian. Most of his writings piece together things we know have occurred, tossing aside the tendency to censor the unpretty. As in the myriad ranks of our own recollections, the only question is whether we can accept his past as true. Often, like most historians, we try to massage the record, weaving a tapestry from a seemingly endless wave of threads to make a suitable portrait. What most people crave is a scene that inspires their hopes or confirms their notions of beauty.

Bennett has spent more than a half-century delving into collective memory, tearing away the curtains of obscurity and opening sealed volumes to dig out the truth about his people—African Americans. Before the Mayflower, his treatise on African-American history, remains a classic. His biography of Martin Luther King Jr., What Manner of Man, received the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Patron Saints Award of the Society of Midland Authors. Yet, at 72, the writer/historian stands amid a hurricane-strength controversy over, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, his first book about a white icon.

In a nutshell, Bennett’s 650-page text explains that everything the average American thinks they know about Abraham Lincoln as “The Great Emancipator” is wrong. The traditional story is that with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, read at Gettysburg, he freed Negroes with a stroke of the pen out of the goodness of his heart.

“No other American story,” Bennett says, “is so enduring. No other American story is so comforting. No other American story is so false.”

The author characterizes the real Lincoln as a David Duke-like conservative who says repeatedly that he believes in white supremacy. Forced into Glory reveals that the former president opposed the basic principle of the Emancipation Proclamation (equality of creation) until his death and was literally forced—Count Adam Gurowski said he was literally whipped—“into the glory of having issued the Emancipation Proclamation,” which Lincoln drafted in such a way that it did not in and of itself free a single slave.

“In one of the great ironies of history, people are always going to the Lincoln Memorial to tell Abraham Lincoln their dream,” said Bennett. “Few know that Lincoln also had a dream. His dream, like Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, was a dream deeply rooted in Thomas Jefferson’s dream. But Lincoln’s dream, like Thomas Jefferson’s dream, was a dream of a lily-white America without Native Americans, African Americans or Martin Luther Kings.”

Many critics agree with Bennett. They say:

• After reading the book, one will never look at Abraham Lincoln in the same way.

• Additional considerations are advanced that define Abraham Lincoln. He ought not to be viewed exclusively as a mythologized leader who died Christ-like for the sins of his country.

• As we continue to review the life and views of “The Great Emancipator,” Forced Into Glory serves to broaden the inventory of legitimate perspectives about Abraham Lincoln.

• This is an original work of scholarship, well researched and passionately presented; it took courage to write and ought to be read.

Others call Bennett a “revisionist” who attempts to look at history through the lens of today. They say:

• Bennett tends to “play loose” with the sources brought to this work.

• The “referencing” in this book is subject to question. Bennett inserts his own words within quotations, which at best is unorthodox if not misleading.

• In his zeal to show that Lincoln was a racist, Bennett slanted his “storyline,” and consequently failed to denote clearly that the struggle to save the Union coincided with the struggle to end slavery.

The publicists say, in a bid to mute the controversy, “In the end, then, Forced Into Glory, is not so much about Lincoln as it is about race, heroes, leadership, political morality and the American Dream. Because Lincoln was not the light, because he is in fact standing in the light, hiding our way, it is a national imperative, Bennett concludes, to confront the mythmakers and to begin the task that terrified Lincoln, the task of creating the rainbow America that knows neither black nor white, neither Saxon nor Indian, but holds an equal scepter over all.”

Bennett’s recollections of Lincoln are challenged more because of what they show, not on the basis of whether they ever happened. Even critics are willing to concede that the once-exalted liberator of African Americans might have used the N-word, or said, “What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races.”

“If Lincoln had had his way,” states Bennett in the book, “Martin Luther King Jr., Oprah Winfrey, Jesse Jackson Sr., Lena Horne, Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks...and even Clarence Thomas, would have been born in slavery...and millions of twentieth-century whites would have been in Gone With the Wind instead of watching it.”

Bennett says Forced Into Glory does what he has spent a half-century doing in fiction and nonfiction. It shines light on small incidents and people the broader society overlooked or forgot. Even the current book is dedicated to virtual unknowns, “the real emancipators,” as he calls them, who believed in the real dream and tried to live it.

Among these, he cites William Walker, a black sergeant court-martialed and executed for protesting Lincoln’s policies, and Calvin Fairbanks, a white activist who spent seventeen years in jail for helping the victims of the fugitive slave laws Lincoln supported.

Many of Bennett’s black history revelations filled the pages of Ebony magazine, the nation’s oldest and largest black-owned publication. Others were shared in a wide range of books, poems and short stories. Many have been translated into French, German, Japanese, Swedish, Russian and Arabic.

He was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a small city in the nation’s poorest state. The very name of the Mississippi Delta town offered big hope to many African Americans. That was where hundreds caught the train north to Chicago and tens of other cities to find refuge from the segregated South. Lerone Bennett Jr.’s family might have joined the parade, except the year was 1928. In less than 12 months, the entire nation would feel poverty’s wrath as hard as Mississippi’s blacks had since slavery.

Bennett grew up in Jackson, the capital. His mother, Alma Read Bennett, was a restaurant cook. His father, Lerone Bennett Sr., was a chauffeur. He and his sister, Elnore Hickman, shared in what should have been a better than average life for African Americans during the Depression. Jackson, a city with at least three black colleges—Tugaloo, Campbell and Jackson State, was a magnet for the educated.

“The climate provided some windows which made it possible for young blacks to breathe and to get different kinds of ideas of what they could do with there lives,” said Bennett. That was why he chose to attend Morehouse College.

“Several men in Jackson, Mississippi, were graduates of Morehouse,” he said. “Some were associated with Jackson State College, such as the dean and the president at one time. Others taught in the public school system. They were extraordinary individuals.

This was a terrible time with almost total violence against and oppression of black people, and these men tried to act like men, and walk and talk like men at a time when it was dangerous to be a black man. I was impressed by them, so I wanted to go to school where they went to school.”

That decision led him to be exposed to Dr. Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse and a great historian and teacher. “His presence was felt everywhere on the campus,” Bennett said. “He never stopped teaching about manhood and struggle, as well as about books. It was a transforming experience to be one of his students and to be in his presence during those formative years.”

The 1949 graduate of Morehouse is a classic example of the excellence to which most men who passed through the historically black college in the mid-century aspired. That is why about…time features the trailblazing author and historian’s career. In a wide-ranging discussion with Executive Editor Carolyne S. Blount, he cites the importance of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Bennett said it is likely another will occur in the 21st century.

about…time: Obviously you have been empowered by Dr. Mays’ personal integrity, so the lessons remain with you?

Bennett: Yes, all these years. He talked with us every Tuesday in chapel, covering everything from manners to the struggle for our rights. He focused on dignity and integrity, as well as excellence...always excellence! Everybody who had the rare opportunity to listen to him and study with him in that campus environment was changed. He had one of the most profound influences on Martin Luther King Jr.

about…time: In the book, you compliment your teachers from high school and college. What opened your mind to history?

Bennett: My high school history teacher, Mrs. M.D. Manning. It’s just that she made the people so exciting. History was much more than dates and names. She made everything in history exciting, so it would just hop, skip and dance. I caught the fire from her and I have been interested in history ever since. Her teaching was a real dramatic spectacle that made you become involved and I’ve tried to follow that in everything that I have done.

about…time: People who were not necessarily all that interested in history before reading your book are really getting into the story on Lincoln. As I was reading Forced Into Glory, I felt drawn into the mindset of the people of that time and could share in the process. You were teaching critical thinking as I read along.

Bennett: That’s what history ought to be about. It ought to be dramatic and human and it ought to put you in the middle of the action and make you feel that this involves you and that you’ve got to make a decision about it. I am just overwhelmed to know that that happens to some readers. That is what I try to do.

about…time: The writing also helped me see some consistent parallels in contemporary history as well.

Bennett: Yes, there are parallels between what happened then and what is happening now. The whole general idea is that government is a place where people make decisions and their fateful decisions will follow them and impact others for years and centuries. Also, it provides some sense that although our actions might not be on a world scale, we make decisions everyday and we are historical.

about…time: How have critics responded to your efforts to bring history to light?

Bennett: Before the Mayflower has been received very well for almost thirty to forty years. That it is one on the best selling black history books of all time. The Shaping of Black America, which is a slightly different work, has also been received very well.

Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream is a slightly different book. It’s a major study of a white political leader and a major study of a white icon. More than that, it is a different study of a white icon, which tells us that everything that we know about that icon is wrong and that almost everything that people have been teaching us about him the last 135 years is wrong. So there have been some screams and shouts. That is to be expected. This is a very painful thing to ask people to confront a myth that they have held dear for all these many years.

about…time: And many published historians helped create the Lincoln myth...

Bennett: Yes, and they help perpetuate the myths by repeating this mess which has no basis in reality. In Forced Into Glory, I am suggesting that all of us, black and white, need to seriously think about these myths and about Abraham Lincoln and about slavery and about emancipation, because all these things have reverberations to what is happening today.

about…time: Where is the study of black history today?

Bennett: I think we have just scratched the surface of digging into the great mine of material on African Americans and the African-American experience in America and the new world, as well as in Africa. However, I see all of this historically. I don’t think any of this just happened yesterday. Instead, I think we must go back to the great scholars of the 19th century, to George Washington Williams, especially, who produced a great work in the 19th century—History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 (2 vols., 1883)—and go back to the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson who created the foundation for what we are doing today. Then there follows John Hope Franklin, Benjamin Quarles and Charles Harris Wesley. All these people created a foundation that we are building upon today.

In the 1960s, I think we made a great leap forward, primarily because of the movement of the black masses. Early in the movement, black people made a demand for black studies, and whenever great masses of people demand more, we grow in stature, both intellectually and academically. So the 1960s provided a great turning point, but there is much more to be done.

We need to continue to work on definitive works about other people, like John Jones here in Illinois who was a major person in the 19th century and the emancipation movement. As stated in Forced Into Glory, I also would like to see additional studies crossing the line to cover white Americans who were deeply involved in African-American affairs but are generally not know in America today. That would include people like Wendall Phillips and Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, all of whom were major figures in the emancipation process. There is so much more to be done. We have done a lot and ought to be proud of that, but we have lost ground since the 1960s in terms of the black studies movement and the demand for a deeper and more relevant confrontation to include the black experience in public school systems in this country. We’ve got to go back to the 1960s and pick up the torch and go forward again.

about…time: What happened, how did the torch get dropped?

Bennett: We were better organized in the 1960s—students marched and demonstrated, intellectuals marched and demonstrated, everybody struggled. There have been several conservative backlashes since then and that is, in part, why we have lost ground. We are not as active as we were in the 1960s. We need to pick up that momentum and go again to the front lines to fight for inclusion of the African-American experience.

Anybody can walk into any bookstore at any university and see other disciplines that were products of the black studies movement—Asian and oriental studies, women’s studies, ethnic studies. All of these grew out of the black studies movement, which changed education in this country, but all of them have made more progress since the 1960s than we have. We must go back and pick up the torch and continue that struggle.

about…time: What do you think was the greatest event in the 20th century for African Americans?

Bennett: So far, without a doubt, the Freedom Movement of the 1960s created the greatest change for African Americans. So the greatest event of the 20th century was the Freedom Movement which started roughly with Montgomery and continued at least through the assassination of King. That movement changed African Americans. It changed our consciousness and changed our relationship with ourselves and with the world.

Not only that, I think it is one of the most profound movements in the whole of American society, because that movement changed America and it changed the whole south. It created the foundation that led up to the election of white presidents from the South. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were products of the Freedom Movement, which created a new voting South that had not existed before.

It created a new South in other ways, as well. Just look at the new Atlanta with its stadium, pro football team, hotels and conventions. If black people had not turned the South upside down and eliminated the Jim Crow signs and restriction of the black vote, that whole structure would not exist today. Holding the Summer Olympics and World Cup games in Atlanta and other parts of the south would have been unthinkable.

about…time: So in the sense that George Washington Carver’s research revolutionized the agricultural industry of the South and saved it from bankruptcy back in his time, are you saying the Civil Rights Movement revolutionized the New South?

Bennett: The whole south changes, the economy changes, politics, the whole of America is better off because of that movement. The second part of your question is just very simple. I think we are called on to create another Freedom Movement in the 21st century and change America as we much in the 21st as we did in the 20th century.

about…time: Why did you choose to remain at Ebony, which is a general feature publication versus pursuing more scholarly adventures in major academic institutions?

Bennett: Well, I made a decision early in my life that I wanted to write for black people and I wanted to reach as many black people as I possibly could. Some intellectual magazines reach 10,000 to 15,000 or 50,000 people. I wanted to reach and talk to a mass audience. At Ebony, I have had the opportunity to do that.

I write historical articles, essays and other stories while speaking to a mass audience. I also get to do analysis similar to that of Abraham Lincoln. These writings have reached large numbers of people and is what I wanted to do with my life. I have had offers to go to white magazines and newspapers, and I turned them down. I have decided that, for better or worse, I wanted to write for the black press and speak to black people.

about…time: I noticed that in your introduction to the Ebony Pictorial History of Black America, you spoke of writing about the sounds and struggles of forgotten men and women. Does that continue to guide you?

Bennett: Yes it does. American scholarship has generally been conservative and mystifying in interpreting slavery, reconstruction and emancipation. I have tried to provide a new framework for examining these historical events, primarily by looking at them from the standpoint of the victims and not the oppressors. For example, I am just appalled that so few people know what really happened to black people in the Civil War. I am just appalled that all over this country, educated people—black and white—believe that Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves. Abraham Lincoln never intended to free the slaves. Few people know that Abraham Lincoln wanted to deport all black people and have a white nation. So I wrote this book so more black and white people can be delivered from these myths and we can create a real emancipation proclamation that has never been issued in this country.

about…time: How might you characterize the methodology used in your book?

Bennett: First of all, I tried to do something that has not been done often in this country. I tried to interpret a major white historical figure from the standpoint of the victims and not the slave masters or the oppressors. I said in the beginning that I was interpreting this story from the standpoint of the slaves and that was one of the major things I tried to do in the book. Throughout this book, there are indications that call for a new methodology in seeing somebody like Abraham Lincoln and interpreting somebody like Abraham Lincoln.

about…time: What will be your next work?

Bennett: I don’t know what the next project is except for compiling a book of major essays that I have written over the years.

about…time: Have you talked with other scholars who are working on similar projects?

Bennett: We have been told that my book on Lincoln is one of the first books by an African-American author on a white historical figure. I’m not talking about a book on Lincoln and the Negro or on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Negro or on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. We’re talking about producing a book on the person himself and the meaning of that person’s life for America. I think we need more books like that from African-American authors that deal with the whole American society. We need some young black scholar—male or female—to do a major study on Thomas Jefferson, with the Sally Hemmings connection as just a part of that book. People have told me that has not been done before. I am not sure about that, but this is probably one of the first books by a black author on a major white historical figure. We need more.

about…time: This book was published in February and yet I wasn’t able to find copies of Forced Into Glory  at black bookstores or major book outlets in Rochester, New York, and only one copy was available in the entire Monroe County public library system and that was already checked out. Have you sold out of copies?