Ellington

The women wore breathtaking hats to hear Lerone Bennett Jr. A gargantuan canary-yellow feather creation was perfectly calibrated to match the wearer's canary-yellow suit. A bright-pink straw hat had big pink plastic roses encircling the brim. And, on the head of a younger woman, a red glitter cowboy hat winked a hint of ironic non-conformity.

I was attending the Mississippi State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and Youth Affiliates at the Ramada Inn Southwest Conference Center on Sept. 7. Bennett, a graduate of Lanier High School, the executive editor of Ebony Magazine and a hometown hero, had come down from Chicago to speak to the women. Carolyn Nelson, vice president of the Jackson federation, welcomed us. "We're the oldest organized club for women of color in the United States of America," she said, adding that the goal is "lifting as we climb." The group turns 100 next year, and has sister chapters for women and young people in 37 other states. Finally, after the Lanier High School Jazz Band played to rousing applause, Bennett took the podium.

Bennett's writings are blunt and inspiring. In a 1978 paper presented at Ole Miss, he wrote, "The problem of race in Mississippi, and in America, is a white problem, and we shall not overcome until we confront that problem." Whites, he said then, must face the "political, economic and social realities of the 20th century." At the luncheon, it was clear Bennett — the son of a cook and a chauffeur — hasn't lost any fire since he wrote that paper 24 years ago. "We black people don't know who we are. Nobody in the country and Mississippi has done more than black Mississippians. Nobody in the country and the world is owed more," he said to cheers and "you know it." He then added with a grin, "See where I'm going?" The task, he said, is to "make this guilty country apologize and make reparations to descendants of slaves and sharecroppers." Otherwise, "history won't forgive."

Bennett warned the women not to believe all the history they've been taught, pointing to his book, "Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream" (Johnson Publishing), which he signed afterward. Lincoln, he said, did not fight to free slaves in the South but merely to keep Western states free states.
Afterward, Gabrielle High, a hatless 10th-grader at St. Joseph Catholic School, said Bennett's message "should be explained to youth; we don't understand what's going on." She planned to tell her friends. "It was good. Surely," said Jessie L. Dobbins, 90, nodding sweetly under her small black straw hat with a single flower.

– Donna Ladd

Free Press Facts:

Lerone Bennett Jr. was born in Clarksdale, Miss., in 1928 and raised in Jackson, where he attended Lanier High School. He worked with the Lanier high school paper and edited The Mississippi Enterprise, a black paper in Jackson. He attended Morehouse College where he was editor of the college paper. He later became an editor for the Atlanta Daily World and then was the associate editor of Jet and Ebony. He is an African-American historian and has published many books, including "Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America," in 1962.