Leonard Jeffries
Encyclopedia
Leonard Jeffries Jr. is an American professor of black studies at the City College of New York
, part of the City University of New York
. He achieved national prominence in the early 1990s for his controversial statements about Jews and other white people. In a 1991 speech he claimed that Jews financed the slave trade, used the movie industry to hurt black people, and that whites are "ice people" while Africans are "sun people". Jeffries was discharged from his position as chairman of the black studies department at CUNY, leading to a lengthy legal battle.
for his undergraduate work. While in Lafayette, Jeffries pledged, and was accepted into, Pi Lambda Phi
, "the Jewish fraternity," which was the only fraternity at Lafayette that would accept black students. In his senior year, Jeffries was elected president of the fraternity, and as a result, his room and board expenses were paid for by the fraternity. After graduating with honors in 1959, Jeffries won a Rotary International
fellowship to the University of Lausanne
in Switzerland and then returned in 1961 to study at Columbia University
's School of International Affairs from which he received a master's degree
in 1965. At the same time he worked for Operation Crossroads Africa
allowing him to spend time in Guinea
, Mali
, Senegal
, and the Ivory Coast, and became the program coordinator for West Africa in 1965. Jeffries became a political science instructor at CCNY in 1969 and received his doctorate in 1971 with a dissertation on politics in the Ivory Coast. He became the founding chairman of Black Studies at San Jose State College in California. A year later, he became a tenure
d professor at CCNY and became the chairman of the new African-American Studies Department. It was unusual for an inexperienced scholar to both receive tenure and a chair.
He held the position of chairman of CCNY's Black Studies Department for over two decades, recruiting like-minded scholars and growing the department. Besides administration and teaching, he often travelled to Africa and served in the African Heritage Studies Association, a group seeking to define and develop the black studies discipline. Jeffries did not publish much original scholarship. He told the New York
magazine "My students say, 'Doctor J., why don't you write?' I say, 'I can't--I'm making history so I don't have time to write it.'"
Jeffries became popular among his students and as a speaker at college campuses and in public. He is known for radical Afrocentrist
views—that the role of African people in history and the accomplishments of African Americans is far more important than commonly held.
, a Jewish member of the task force.
Jeffries had also advanced a theory that whites are "ice people" who are violent and cruel, while blacks are "sun people" who are compassionate and peaceful. He is a proponent of melanin theory
and claims that melanin
levels affect the psyche of people, and that melanin allows black people to "…negotiate the vibrations of the universe and to deal with the ultraviolet rays of the sun."
His lectures and talks have been characterized as "racist rants".
In an interview in Rutherford Magazine May 1995 Jeffries, asked what kind of world he would want to leave to his children, he answered: "A world in which there aren’t any white people".
Jeffries has said that the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster was "the best thing to happen to America in a long time," as it would stop white people from "spreading their filth through the universe."
Philip Gourevitch
at Commentary
calls him "a black supremacist who uses his classroom to teach his notion that the skin pigment melanin endows blacks with physical and intellectual superiority."
During the court cases, Jeffries made a speech where he represented white people with various animals, English as elephants, Dutch as squirrels, and Jews as skunks who "stunk up everything".
, using it to paint a brutal stereotype of blacks. He also attacked Diane Ravitch
, calling her a "sophisticated Texas Jew," "a debonair racist" and "Miss Daisy."
Later, after the local cable television channel NY-SCAN
broadcast the speech and the New York Post
reported on it, many journalists and some Jewish leaders criticized Jeffries for bigoted, racist and antisemitic remarks. Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley wrote, "Talk such as Jeffries engaged in at Albany has nothing to do with 'ideas' -- it's bigotry, pure and simple." Another New York columnist called it "pure Goebbels
". New York Governor Mario Cuomo
said Jeffries rant was "so egregious that the City University ought to take action or explain why it doesn't," but later defended Jeffries' "freedom to abuse [freedom]." New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato also demanded Jeffries' resignation. The chancellor of CUNY, W. Ann Reynolds
said in a statement that she was shocked and deeply disturbed by the speech.
When Jeffries returned from a trip to Africa he was met by nearly 1,000 of his supporters at the airport, as well as a handful of mostly Jewish protesters from a group called Kahane Chai. Students picketed his public appearances and outside his home. Jeffries told Emerge that he received hate mail, phone calls to his home, and death threats. He had bodyguards follow him on campus. Others felt threatened by Jeffries and his bodyguards. A Jewish student from Harvard University said that Jeffries threatened him during an interview for The Harvard Crimson
.
rights had been violated. The school held that the demotion was not because of his speech, but for inefficiency, tardiness, sending grades to the school by mail, and brutish behavior. However, only a month before the speech Jeffries had been unanimously reappointed as chairman. He was restored as chairman and awarded $400,000 in damages (later reduced to $360,000).
The school appealed, but the federal appeals court upheld the verdict while removing the damages. The CUNY Institute for Research on the Diaspora in the Americas and Caribbean was created to do black research independent of Jeffries' department. It was headed by Edmund W. Gordon
, who had led the Black Studies Department before Jeffries was reinstated. In November 1994 the Supreme Court told the appeals court to reconsider after a related Supreme Court decision. The appeals court reversed its decision in April 1995, and in June the same year Prof. Moyibi Amodo was elected to succeed Jeffries as department chairman. Jeffries remains a professor at CCNY.
, academic freedom
and free speech. He was sometimes compared to Michael Levin
, a Jewish CUNY professor who outside of the classroom claimed that black people are inferior, and had recently won against the school in court.
One interpretation of the Jeffries case is that while a university cannot fire a professor for opinions and speech, they have more flexibility with a position like department chair. Another is that it allows public institutions to discipline employees in general for disruptive speech.
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...
, part of the City University of New York
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...
. He achieved national prominence in the early 1990s for his controversial statements about Jews and other white people. In a 1991 speech he claimed that Jews financed the slave trade, used the movie industry to hurt black people, and that whites are "ice people" while Africans are "sun people". Jeffries was discharged from his position as chairman of the black studies department at CUNY, leading to a lengthy legal battle.
Academic career
Jeffries attended Lafayette CollegeLafayette College
Lafayette College is a private coeducational liberal arts and engineering college located in Easton, Pennsylvania, USA. The school, founded in 1826 by James Madison Porter,son of General Andrew Porter of Norristown and citizens of Easton, first began holding classes in 1832...
for his undergraduate work. While in Lafayette, Jeffries pledged, and was accepted into, Pi Lambda Phi
Pi Lambda Phi
Pi Lambda Phi International Fraternity Inc. is a college social fraternity with 35 active chapters and four colonies in the United States and Canada....
, "the Jewish fraternity," which was the only fraternity at Lafayette that would accept black students. In his senior year, Jeffries was elected president of the fraternity, and as a result, his room and board expenses were paid for by the fraternity. After graduating with honors in 1959, Jeffries won a Rotary International
Rotary International
Rotary International is an organization of service clubs known as Rotary Clubs located all over the world. The stated purpose of the organization is to bring together business and professional leaders to provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and help...
fellowship to the University of Lausanne
University of Lausanne
The University of Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland was founded in 1537 as a school of theology, before being made a university in 1890. Today about 12,000 students and 2200 researchers study and work at the university...
in Switzerland and then returned in 1961 to study at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
's School of International Affairs from which he received a master's degree
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
in 1965. At the same time he worked for Operation Crossroads Africa
Operation Crossroads Africa
Operation Crossroads Africa is a non-profit, non-governmental organization working to build links between North America and Africa. It was founded in 1957 by the priest James Herman Robinson. OCA annually sends groups of young volunteers from North America to work on projects in Africa. At its...
allowing him to spend time in Guinea
Guinea
Guinea , officially the Republic of Guinea , is a country in West Africa. Formerly known as French Guinea , it is today sometimes called Guinea-Conakry to distinguish it from its neighbour Guinea-Bissau. Guinea is divided into eight administrative regions and subdivided into thirty-three prefectures...
, Mali
Mali
Mali , officially the Republic of Mali , is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with...
, Senegal
Senegal
Senegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...
, and the Ivory Coast, and became the program coordinator for West Africa in 1965. Jeffries became a political science instructor at CCNY in 1969 and received his doctorate in 1971 with a dissertation on politics in the Ivory Coast. He became the founding chairman of Black Studies at San Jose State College in California. A year later, he became a tenure
Tenure
Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause.-19th century:...
d professor at CCNY and became the chairman of the new African-American Studies Department. It was unusual for an inexperienced scholar to both receive tenure and a chair.
He held the position of chairman of CCNY's Black Studies Department for over two decades, recruiting like-minded scholars and growing the department. Besides administration and teaching, he often travelled to Africa and served in the African Heritage Studies Association, a group seeking to define and develop the black studies discipline. Jeffries did not publish much original scholarship. He told the New York
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
magazine "My students say, 'Doctor J., why don't you write?' I say, 'I can't--I'm making history so I don't have time to write it.'"
Jeffries became popular among his students and as a speaker at college campuses and in public. He is known for radical Afrocentrist
Afrocentrism
Afrocentrism is cultural ideology mostly limited to the United States, dedicated to the history of Black people a response to global racist attitudes about African people and their historical contributions by revisiting this history with an African cultural and ideological center...
views—that the role of African people in history and the accomplishments of African Americans is far more important than commonly held.
Controversy
Jeffries became known outside his field in 1987 when he was on a state task force to fight racism in the public school curriculum. Its publication A Curriculum of Inclusion harshly criticized the public school syllabi for Eurocentrism and demanded revisions to emphasize African history and accomplishments of African Americans. He often clashed with Diane RavitchDiane Ravitch
Diane Silvers Ravitch is an historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S...
, a Jewish member of the task force.
Jeffries had also advanced a theory that whites are "ice people" who are violent and cruel, while blacks are "sun people" who are compassionate and peaceful. He is a proponent of melanin theory
Melanin theory
Melanin theory is a pseudoscientific theory, founded in the distortion of the known physical properties of melanin, a natural polymer and organic semiconductor. In humans, melanin is the primary determinant of skin color. People whose ancestors lived for long periods in the regions of the globe...
and claims that melanin
Melanin
Melanin is a pigment that is ubiquitous in nature, being found in most organisms . In animals melanin pigments are derivatives of the amino acid tyrosine. The most common form of biological melanin is eumelanin, a brown-black polymer of dihydroxyindole carboxylic acids, and their reduced forms...
levels affect the psyche of people, and that melanin allows black people to "…negotiate the vibrations of the universe and to deal with the ultraviolet rays of the sun."
His lectures and talks have been characterized as "racist rants".
In an interview in Rutherford Magazine May 1995 Jeffries, asked what kind of world he would want to leave to his children, he answered: "A world in which there aren’t any white people".
Jeffries has said that the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster was "the best thing to happen to America in a long time," as it would stop white people from "spreading their filth through the universe."
Philip Gourevitch
Philip Gourevitch
Philip Gourevitch , an American author and journalist, is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and the former editor of The Paris Review. His most recent book is The Ballad of Abu Ghraib , an account of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison under the American occupation...
at Commentary
Commentary (magazine)
Commentary is a monthly American magazine on politics, Judaism, social and cultural issues. It was founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945. By 1960 its editor was Norman Podhoretz, a liberal at the time who moved sharply to the right in the 1970s and 1980s becoming a strong voice for the...
calls him "a black supremacist who uses his classroom to teach his notion that the skin pigment melanin endows blacks with physical and intellectual superiority."
During the court cases, Jeffries made a speech where he represented white people with various animals, English as elephants, Dutch as squirrels, and Jews as skunks who "stunk up everything".
1991 speech
On July 20, 1991, Jeffries held a controversial speech at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival, in Albany, New York. During the two hour speech, he said that "rich Jews" financed the slave trade and control the film industry together with Italian mafiaMafia
The Mafia is a criminal syndicate that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Sicily, Italy. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organizational structure and code of conduct, and whose common enterprise is protection racketeering...
, using it to paint a brutal stereotype of blacks. He also attacked Diane Ravitch
Diane Ravitch
Diane Silvers Ravitch is an historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S...
, calling her a "sophisticated Texas Jew," "a debonair racist" and "Miss Daisy."
Later, after the local cable television channel NY-SCAN
NY-SCAN
NY-SCAN was a Public, educational, and government access cable television channel in Albany, New York...
broadcast the speech and the New York Post
New York Post
The New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...
reported on it, many journalists and some Jewish leaders criticized Jeffries for bigoted, racist and antisemitic remarks. Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley wrote, "Talk such as Jeffries engaged in at Albany has nothing to do with 'ideas' -- it's bigotry, pure and simple." Another New York columnist called it "pure Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
". New York Governor Mario Cuomo
Mario Cuomo
Mario Matthew Cuomo served as the 52nd Governor of New York from 1983 to 1994, and is the father of Andrew Cuomo, the current governor of New York.-Early life:...
said Jeffries rant was "so egregious that the City University ought to take action or explain why it doesn't," but later defended Jeffries' "freedom to abuse [freedom]." New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato also demanded Jeffries' resignation. The chancellor of CUNY, W. Ann Reynolds
W. Ann Reynolds
Wynetka Ann Reynolds is a zoologist and university administrator who has served as provost of the Ohio State University , chancellor of the California State University system , chancellor of the City University of New York , and president of the University of Alabama at Birmingham...
said in a statement that she was shocked and deeply disturbed by the speech.
When Jeffries returned from a trip to Africa he was met by nearly 1,000 of his supporters at the airport, as well as a handful of mostly Jewish protesters from a group called Kahane Chai. Students picketed his public appearances and outside his home. Jeffries told Emerge that he received hate mail, phone calls to his home, and death threats. He had bodyguards follow him on campus. Others felt threatened by Jeffries and his bodyguards. A Jewish student from Harvard University said that Jeffries threatened him during an interview for The Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper of Harvard University, was founded in 1873. It is the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is run entirely by Harvard College undergraduates...
.
Removal as chairman and legal battles
In 1992 Jeffries first got his term shortened from three years to one, and was then removed as chairman from the department of African-American studies, but was allowed to stay as a professor. Jeffries sued the school and in August 1993 a federal jury found that his First AmendmentFirst Amendment to the United States Constitution
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...
rights had been violated. The school held that the demotion was not because of his speech, but for inefficiency, tardiness, sending grades to the school by mail, and brutish behavior. However, only a month before the speech Jeffries had been unanimously reappointed as chairman. He was restored as chairman and awarded $400,000 in damages (later reduced to $360,000).
The school appealed, but the federal appeals court upheld the verdict while removing the damages. The CUNY Institute for Research on the Diaspora in the Americas and Caribbean was created to do black research independent of Jeffries' department. It was headed by Edmund W. Gordon
Edmund W. Gordon
Dr. Edmund W. Gordon , a professor of psychology, "had a tremendous influence on contemporary thinking in psychology, education and social policy and the implications of his work for the schooling of lower status youth and children of color, in America".Professor Gordon’s career spans professional...
, who had led the Black Studies Department before Jeffries was reinstated. In November 1994 the Supreme Court told the appeals court to reconsider after a related Supreme Court decision. The appeals court reversed its decision in April 1995, and in June the same year Prof. Moyibi Amodo was elected to succeed Jeffries as department chairman. Jeffries remains a professor at CCNY.
Later debate
The Jeffries case led to debate about tenureTenure
Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause.-19th century:...
, academic freedom
Academic freedom
Academic freedom is the belief that the freedom of inquiry by students and faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy, and that scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment.Academic freedom is a...
and free speech. He was sometimes compared to Michael Levin
Michael Levin
Michael Levin is a philosophy professor at City University of New York. He has published on metaphysics, epistemology, race, homosexuality, animal rights, the philosophy of archaeology, the philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science.Levin's central research interests...
, a Jewish CUNY professor who outside of the classroom claimed that black people are inferior, and had recently won against the school in court.
One interpretation of the Jeffries case is that while a university cannot fire a professor for opinions and speech, they have more flexibility with a position like department chair. Another is that it allows public institutions to discipline employees in general for disruptive speech.
See also
- African-American – Jewish relations #Black anti-semitism
- AfrocentrismAfrocentrismAfrocentrism is cultural ideology mostly limited to the United States, dedicated to the history of Black people a response to global racist attitudes about African people and their historical contributions by revisiting this history with an African cultural and ideological center...
- Anti-EuropeanismAnti-EuropeanismAnti-Europeanism refers to rejection of the culture of Europe and Europeanisation, sentiments, opinions and discrimination against European ethnic groups, and criticism of policies of European governments and the European Union...
External links
- Jeffries' on AfricaWithin
- Leonard Jeffries Virtual Museum at the National Black United FrontNational Black United FrontThe National Black United Front is an African-American organization formed in the late 1970s in Brooklyn, New York. Its headquarters are in South Shore, Chicago, Illinois....
website (Archived from the original)