Lerone Bennett Quotes

Back there, before Jim Crow, before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them, the Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures. Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together.3 —Lerone Bennett Jr.

As historian Lerone Bennett Jr. eloquently reminds us, 'A nation is a choice.' We could choose to be a nation that extends care, compassion, and concern to those who are locked up and locked out or headed for prison before they are old enough to vote. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own children; we could treat them like one of 'us.' We could do that. Or we can choose to be a nation that shames and blames its most vulnerable, affixes badges of dishonor upon them at young ages, and then relegates them to a permanent second-class status for life. That is the path we have chosen, and it leads to a familiar place.

He looks out on a raging battlefield and sees error everywhere, and he thinks he can find the truth by avoiding error. —Lerone Bennett, “Tea and Sympathy: Liberals and Other White Hopes,” 1964

historian Lerone Bennett Jr. eloquently reminds us, “a nation is a choice.

A brilliant administrator and an enlightened legislator, Askia reorganized the army, improved the banking and credit systems and made Gao, Walata, Timbuktu, and Jenne intellectual centers. He has been hailed as one of the greatest monarchs of this period.

Alexander Chamberlain said: “In personal character, in administrative ability, in devotion to the welfare of his subjects, in open-mindedness towards foreign influences, and in wisdom in the adoption of non-Negro ideas and institutions, King Askia . . . was certainly the equal of the average European monarch of the time and superior to many of them.

The Mosaic records allude to them frequently; but while they are described as the most powerful, the most just, and the most beautiful of the human race, they are constantly spoken of as black, and there seems to be no other conclusion to be drawn, than that at that remote period of history the leading race of the Western World was a black race.

But a year before the Mayflower, in 1619, another ship dropped anchor on the eastern shore of North America. Its name was the White Lion, and it, too, would become one of the most important ships in American history. And yet there is no ship manifest inscribed with the names of its passengers and no descendants’ society. These people’s arrival was deemed so insignificant, their humanity so inconsequential, that we do not know even how many of those packed into the White Lion’s hull came ashore, just that some “20 and odd Negroes” disembarked and joined the British colonists in Virginia. But in his sweeping history Before the Mayflower, first published in 1962, scholar Lerone Bennett, Jr., said of the White Lion, “No one sensed how extraordinary she really was…[but] few ships, before or since, have unloaded a more momentous cargo.

According to Lerone Bennett Jr., the author of the book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, Lincoln even made many racist jokes and used racist language. Many Lincoln admirers

According to Lerone Bennett Jr., the author of the book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, Lincoln even made many racist jokes and used racist language. Many Lincoln admirers have claimed that he no longer concerned himself with repatriating Blacks out of America after the Civil War. However, Phillip Maggess and Sebastian Page, the authors of the book Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement For Black Resettlement, have used documents from the British and U.S. National archives to prove that until the last moments of his life,