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who directed the Morehouse Honors Program. “Dr. Jackson was the kind of professor that you hear about who has high standards, high expectations, but is kindhearted and cares about the full person and just really invested in our lives in a way that you really want when you go to a place like Morehouse,” he recalled. “If you talk to any of us who came through the Honors Program around that time, we have just
Bennett had long admired the work Lerone Bennett Jr. had done at Johnson Publishing Company and Ebony Magazine. So when he saw the older Bennett at a Morehouse Board of Trustees meeting, he didn’t waste the opportunity. Bennett was a junior then and knew he would be the next editor in chief of the Morehouse student newspaper. “He just pulled me aside, and we had about an hour- long conversation,” Bennett said, and [he] was just giving me tips. He actually had a physical Maroon Tiger paper and was going through it and was redlining it and saying, ‘If I were you, I would do this and change this headline,’ and just walked me through his career and the trajectory of Ebony Magazine and Johnson Publishing and how it all came to be. So that, for me, was huge. That was the only time that I met him, but I’m so grateful that I had that experience.” As a resident advisor at Morehouse’s Graves Hall dormitory, Bennett said, he, too, often found himself trying with mixed success to guide classmates who were having trouble meeting the financial demands of attending college. “There would be just some smart brothers who did not have the finances to come back for the second semester. Some of them had to drop out the first semester,” he said. Two such conversations still stick in his memory. The younger students viewed Bennett as a big brother, and he worried that he couldn’t help them figure
out their financial troubles. “This was around the time that Oprah Winfrey had first made a large donation to Morehouse,” he recalled. “So I would always say the same thing. Go to financial aid, tell them your story, and ask for the Oprah money because that’s all I knew to say.” In both instances, that’s what the students did. And it worked. “That planted a seed in my head that if I were ever in a position to provide a scholarship, clearly not at the level of Oprah, but to help in any way that I could, I would,” he said. In 2022, he followed through, starting a five-year commitment that can be renewed that provides scholarship assistance for four students each year who are English or journalism majors. “It’s a blessing to be able to do it, but it’s also what we’re called to do as Morehouse Men to help pave a way for other people,” Bennett said. But Bennett’s biggest life- altering event at Morehouse came when he met Beth Perry, a 2003 graduate of Spelman College. The two met while she worked for the Spelman student newspaper and he worked at the Maroon Tiger. They married in 2010. “Meeting Beth was the most important and significant turning point of my life,” Bennett said. “I didn’t know when we met that we would later marry, but our relationship is the foundation upon which all else rests. My family is the center of my life.”
would send their young boys up to Morehouse, assuming that there would be people there to look after them. And so when I got hip to that, I was like, ‘Well, we should actually start something.’ So in our dorm, we started a little program, helped them with their homework, played sports on the lawn, that kind of thing. And so that was the kind of experience that you would not get anywhere else. Setting aside the education, setting aside the high expectation and the crown that we all wear, all that stuff, just the full range of experiences, it’s just unparalleled.”
incredible stories about her. She would grade our papers and want to make sure that she got them back to us quickly, so she’d show up at Graves Hall on a Saturday morning in a sweatsuit and leather trench coat, handing papers back out to you. That was the level of her devotion.” And then there was Bennett’s chance encounter with the late journalist, historian and Morehouse alumnus Lerone Bennett Jr., whom Bennett jokingly called “Uncle Lerone.” “So far as I know, we’re not related, but I would joke about that because looking at his career path, I’d always say to myself, ‘That is precisely what I would want to do,’ to basically have a foot in both worlds, where you’re doing current news coverage, but you’re also steeped in history, in finding points of connection between the two,” Bennett said.
During his time at Morehouse, Bennett
experienced what many students at Morehouse and other HBCUs do: life-changing interactions with faculty or others associated with the college. Bennett said his first such relationship came with Jocelyn Jackson, a now- retired English professor
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