… on as a visiting professor. In the 1980s, he served on the Chicago Public Library board. In 2000, he spoke at a City Council hearing on reparations for slavery, saying, “African-Americans worked from sunup to sundown, six days a week for 205 years. … We’re not talking about welfare. We’re talking about back pay.”
He was a friend to Illinois poet lauereate Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American to win the Pulitzer prize for poetry. In a eulogy at her funeral, he called her “a Chicago Institution, like Michael Jordan and the lake.”
National leaders frequently tapped his expertise. In 1994, Mr. Bennett was named to President Clinton’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. He also was an early adviser on the development of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
His footprints are in the pavement at the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame in Atlanta for being a “foot soldier” in the movement.