Leonard Jeffries
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. Representative Hakeem 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. 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. Jeffries was discharged from his position as chair of CUNY's Black Studies Department, leading to a long legal battle that ended with the courts affirming the college's right to remove him from the position due to his incendiary remarks. Academic career Jeffries attended Lafayette College for