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 his undergraduate work. At Lafayette, he pledged, and was accepted into, the fraternity Pi Lambda Phi. 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. 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. 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. Jeffries is a proponent of the pseudoscientific melanin theory, which posits that greater skin pigmentation makes Black people inherently superior