Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Introduction \\ 3
center of Western civilization that fed into the teaching and writings of such
Afro-centrists as Molefi Asante, Leonard Jeffries, and Tony Martin. Despite the
scholarly debates that Bernal's writings engendered—his critics, such as Mary
Lefkowitz and Emily Vermeule, were ferociously contemptuous of his conclusions
4 —it was less Afro-centricism that led to a further entanglement between
Blacks and Jews than it was some contentions by Tony Martin and particularly by
Leonard Jeffries. Although little known outside New York City, Jeffries became
the center of considerable controversy in New York when he publicly proclaimed
in 1991 that, among other matters, Jews had played a large part in the slave trade
and that Jews controlled Llollywood and the media. Although Jeffries insisted
that he was not anti-Semitic and that his contentions were historically indisputable,
his comments, played up in the New York press, eventually resulted in
his removal as head of the Department of Afro-American studies at City College
(whose president he referred to as the "head Jew"). Despite the fact that Jeffries
did not receive much support or sympathy from most African Americans, some
Jews were disturbed by what they saw as the failure of prominent African
American leaders to denounce Jeffries, while many Blacks and some Jews were
distressed by what they saw as a violation of Jeffries' right to free speech. The language
of race and racism, as always, became a contested arena.
But the critical attention given to Leonard Jeffries was minor compared to the
furor aroused by Louis Farrakhan and his followers. Farrakhan first gained national
visibility in 1978, when he began to rebuild the Nation of Islam three years
after the death of Elijah Muhammad. It was not until 1991, however—the same
year in which Leonard Jeffries delivered his widely excoriated talk in Albany, New
York—that he really attracted the ire of the institutional Jewish community. In
that year, the Nation of Islam published The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and
Jews: Volume One, a work that purports to look at Jewish involvement in the slave
trade and argues that Jews "carved for themselves a monumental culpability in
slavery." Within two years the Anti-Defamation League published Jew-Hatred as
History, an analysis of The Secret Relationship which made no attempt to argue that
the work was anything but "a mendacious work of anti-Semitic propaganda." To
many, The Secret Relationship was as virulently anti-Semitic as The Protocols of the
Learned Elders of 'Zion (that the two books could be found together in the bookstalls
of Nation of Islam street vendors in Harlem and other large urban settings
only reinforced the comparison). Jewish institutional leaders began to urge Black
leaders to renounce Farrakhan, a call that reached a crescendo in late 1993 when
Khalid Abdul Muhammad, the Nation's national spokesman, delivered a speech
at Kean College in New Jersey in which he referred to Jews as "blood suckers of
the Black nation and the Black community" and Adolph Hitler as "wickedly
great." When Farrakhan demoted Muhammad but failed to refute what his former
national spokesman had said, Jewish fear and anger increased. If Black leaders
did not renounce Farrakhan, it was clear proof that Blacks were anti-Semitic.
The more Jewish institutional leaders asked African American leaders to renounce