Leonard Jeffries
Born (1937-01-19) January 19, 1937
Newark, New Jersey, U.S.
SpouseRosalind Jeffries
Academic background
EducationLafayette College (BA)
Columbia University (MA, PhD)
ThesisSub-National Politics in the Ivory Coast Republic (1972)
Academic work
InstitutionsCity College of New York
San Jose State University

Leonard Jeffries Jr. (born January 19, 1937) is an American political scientist and academic. He was the departmental chair of Black Studies at the City College of New York, part of the City University of New York (CUNY). He was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. He is the uncle of U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Ohio State University historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries.

Known for his Pan-African Afrocentrist views that the role of African people in history and the accomplishments of African Americans are far more important than commonly held, Jeffries has urged that public school syllabi be made less Eurocentric.[1][2] He is a founding director and a former vice president and president of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC).

Jeffries's claims that Jewish businessmen financed the Atlantic slave trade and used the movie industry to hurt black people, and that whites are "ice people" while blacks are "sun people", received national publicity in the early 1990s.[3] Jeffries was discharged from his position as chair of CUNY's Black Studies Department, leading to a long legal battle[4][5][6] that ended with the courts affirming the college's right to remove him from the position due to his incendiary remarks.[7]

Academic career

Jeffries holding up a Gall–Peters projection map

Jeffries attended Lafayette College for his undergraduate work. At Lafayette, he pledged, and was accepted into, the fraternity Pi Lambda Phi.[8] In his senior year, Jeffries was elected president of the fraternity. After graduating with honors in 1959, he won a Rotary International fellowship to the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. In 1961, he began study at Columbia University's School of International Affairs, from which he received a master's degree in 1965.[8][4]

At the same time, Jeffries worked for Operation Crossroads Africa, allowing him to spend time in Guinea, Mali, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast. He became the program coordinator for West Africa in 1965. Jeffries became a political science instructor at City College of New York (CCNY) in 1969 and received his doctorate from Columbia University 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 tenured professor at CCNY and chair of its new Black Studies Department.[8][4]

Jeffries chaired CCNY's Black Studies Department for over two decades, recruiting like-minded scholars and attempting to expand the number of faculty and students within or associated with the department. During his tenure, the department sponsored/hosted/organized 25 major national and international conferences and seminars. Besides administration and teaching, Jeffries often traveled to Africa and served in the African Heritage Studies Association, a group seeking to define and develop the Black Studies discipline.

Jeffries became popular among students and as a speaker at college campuses and public organizations. He is known for his Pan-African Afrocentrist views—that the role of African people in history and the accomplishments of African Americans are far more important than commonly held.[8]

Jeffries is a proponent of the pseudoscientific melanin theory, which posits that greater skin pigmentation makes Black people inherently superior to white people.[9] He says melanin allows Black people to "negotiate the vibrations of the universe and to deal with the ultraviolet rays of the sun".[10] Jeffries has stated (but not published)[11] the idea that whites are "ice people" who are violent and cruel, while blacks are "sun people" who are compassionate and peaceful;[12] historian Mia Bay attributes the origins of this hypothesis to the writings of anthropologist Cheik Anta Diop as well as Michael Bradley, author of The Iceman Inheritance.[11]

During a 1991 speech at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany, New York, Jeffries asserted that Russian Jews and the American Mafia were behind a conspiracy of Hollywood film producers to denigrate Black people, and that Jews had also controlled the Atlantic slave trade. His remarks were broadcast on cable television, drawing angry responses from Italian and Jewish Americans.[13]

In 1992, Jeffries first got his term shortened from three years to one, and then was removed as chair of the department of African-American studies, but allowed to stay as a professor. He sued the school, and in August 1993 a federal jury found that his First Amendment rights had been violated. But Jeffries had been unanimously reappointed as chair. He was awarded $400,000 in damages (later reduced to $360,000).[14][15][16]

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's 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.[17] The appeals court reversed its decision in April 1995,[18] and in June, Professor Moyibi Amodo was elected to succeed Jeffries as department chair.

Academic freedom debate

Jeffries's case led to debate about tenure, academic freedom and free speech.[14][19][20] He was sometimes compared to Michael Levin, a CUNY professor who outside the classroom claimed that black people are inferior, and had recently won against the school in court.[5][2]

One interpretation of Jeffries's case is that while a university cannot fire a professor for opinions and speech, it has more flexibility with a position like department chair. Another is that it allows public institutions to discipline employees in general for disruptive speech.[4]

Works

His State of New York consultancy allowed him to produce the document A Curriculum of Inclusion, calling for changing school curricula to include African, Asian and Latino families.

References

  1. ↑ Stanley, Alessandra (August 7, 1991). "City College Professor Assailed for Remarks on Jews". The New York Times. Retrieved June 29, 2017.
  2. 1 2 Morrow, Lance (June 24, 2001). "Controversies: The Provocative Professor". Time. Archived from the original on May 1, 2008. Retrieved May 14, 2009.
  3. ↑ Benjamin, Richard M. (Winter 1993). "The Bizarre Classroom of Dr. Leonard Jeffries". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (2): 91–96. doi:10.2307/2962577. ISSN 1077-3711. JSTOR 2962577. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Foerstel, Herbert N. (1997). "Jefferies, Leonard". Free expression and censorship in America: an encyclopedia. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 101–102, 132. ISBN 978-0-313-29231-6. LCCN 96042157. OCLC 35317918.
  5. 1 2 Abel, Richard L. (1999). Speaking Respect, Respecting Speech. University of Chicago Press. pp. 101–102. ISBN 0-226-00057-5.
  6. ↑ David Singer, Ruth R. Seldin, ed. (1996). American Jewish Year Book 1996. New York: The American Jewish Committee. pp. 120–121. ISBN 0-87495-110-0. Retrieved May 13, 2009.
  7. ↑ Perez-Pena, Richard (April 5, 1995). "In Reversal, Court Backs City College In Jeffries Lawsuit". The New York Times.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Pendergast, Sara; Pendergast, Tom (2006). Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 56: Profiles from the International Black Community. Detroit: Thomson Gale. p. 8. ISBN 978-0-7876-7928-6.
  9. ↑ Ferguson, Stephen C. (2015). Philosophy of African American Studies: Nothing Left of Blackness. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 56. ISBN 9781137549976.
  10. ↑ Calabresi, Massimo (February 14, 1994). "Dispatches Skin Deep 101". Time. Vol. 143, no. 7. Retrieved January 13, 2021.
  11. 1 2 Bay, Mia (2000). The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925. Oxford University Press. p. 264, n. 19. ISBN 978-0-19-988107-9.
  12. ↑ "A Deafening Silence". National Review. September 9, 1991. Archived from the original on October 12, 2008. Retrieved June 24, 2008.
  13. ↑ Friedman, Saul (2017). Jews and the American Slave Trade. Routledge. p. 1. ISBN 978-1-351-51076-9.
  14. 1 2 "Academic Freedom". West's Encyclopedia of American Law. The Gale Group. 1998. Retrieved May 15, 2009.
  15. ↑ Newman, Maria (May 12, 1993). "CUNY Violated Speech Rights Of Department Chief, Jury Says". The New York Times. pp. A1. Retrieved May 15, 2009.
  16. ↑ Bernstein, Richard (August 5, 1993). "Judge Reinstates Jeffries as Head Of Black Studies for City College". The New York Times. pp. A1. Retrieved May 15, 2009.
  17. ↑ Waters v. Churchill (114 S.Ct. 1878 [1994]), 511 U.S. 661 (1994)
  18. ↑ Jeffries v. Harleston, 52 F.3d 9 [2nd Cir. 1995]
  19. ↑ Finkin, Matthew W. (1996). The case for tenure. Cornell University Press. pp. 190–191. ISBN 0-8014-3316-9. Retrieved May 15, 2009.
  20. ↑ Spitzer, Robert J. (1994). "Tenure, Speech, and the Jeffries Case: A Functional Analysis". Pace Law Review. 15 (111): 111. doi:10.58948/2331-3528.1357. S2CID 142606184. Retrieved May 15, 2009.

Further reading

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