Tony Martin (professor)
Encyclopedia
Tony Martin was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 professor
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 of Africana Studies at Wellesley College who retired in June 2007 as professor emeritus after 34 years teaching at the Africana Studies Department where he was a founding member. A lecturer and prolific author of scholarly articles about Black History, primarily the Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League...

, his written works and statements about the involvement and responsibility of Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...

 in the American slave trade, which echo allegations made by the Nation of Islam
Nation of Islam
The Nation of Islam is a mainly African-American new religious movement founded in Detroit, Michigan by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad in July 1930 to improve the spiritual, mental, social, and economic condition of African-Americans in the United States of America. The movement teaches black pride and...

, have been a source of ongoing controversy.

Academic appointment and credentials

Martin received a B.Sc. honours degree in economics at the University of Hull
University of Hull
The University of Hull, known informally as Hull University, is an English university, founded in 1927, located in Hull, a city in the East Riding of Yorkshire...

 (England) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Michigan State University
Michigan State University
Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...

.

Martin began his teaching career at the University of Michigan-Flint
University of Michigan-Flint
The University of Michigan–Flint is a public university located in Flint, Michigan in the United States...

, the Cipriani Labour College (Trinidad
Trinidad
Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands and numerous landforms which make up the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. It is the southernmost island in the Caribbean and lies just off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. With an area of it is also the fifth largest in...

) and St. Mary's College
Saint Mary's College, Trinidad and Tobago
Saint Mary's College is a government-assisted Catholic secondary school situated on Frederick Street in the heart of Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. The school was established in 1863 with only a handful of students but enrollment today is close to 1200. The school's motto 'Virtus et Scientia'...

 (Trinidad). He began teaching at Wellesley in 1973, became 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 in 1975, and became a full professor in 1979.

He is also a barrister-at-law
Barrister
A barrister is a member of one of the two classes of lawyer found in many common law jurisdictions with split legal professions. Barristers specialise in courtroom advocacy, drafting legal pleadings and giving expert legal opinions...

 from Gray's Inn
Gray's Inn
The Honourable Society of Gray's Inn, commonly known as Gray's Inn, is one of the four Inns of Court in London. To be called to the Bar and practise as a barrister in England and Wales, an individual must belong to one of these Inns...

, London.

Dr. Martin is a prolific author of scholarly articles on many aspects of Black History and has lectured all over the world. He has received awards and honors from the American Philosophical Society, the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and many others.

Marcus Garvey

One of Martin's earliest works is Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, published in 1976.

He has also written a number of other books about Garvey, including Marcus Garvey Hero: A First Biography, African Fundamentalism : A Literary and Cultural Anthology of Garvey's Harlem Renaissance, Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts and the Harlem Renaissance, The Poetical Works of Marcus Garvey, and The Pan- African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond.

He co-authored, with Wendy Ball, Rare Afro-Americana: A Reconstruction of the Adger Library.

Student harassment issue

In October 1991, a Wellesley student, Michelle Plantec, while on hall duty, claimed that she saw Martin wandering in a female dorm in a restricted area, in violation of a rule requiring male guests to be escorted. When she asked him about his escort, Martin, she claims, responded using profanity, accused her of racism and bigotry, and positioned himself so as to physically intimidate her. Martin denied all these claims, and declared that a group of women "accosted him rudely, despite circumstances that in his view made the legitimacy of his presence obvious."

In an interview with a campus newspaper, Plantec said, "I stopped him and said, 'Excuse me, sir, who are you with?' He looked at me and said, 'What do you mean?' I said 'What Wellesley student are you with?' and at that point he exploded and called me a fucking bitch, a racist, and a bigot, among other things. ... After all this, he went back into his meeting and said the only reason I had stopped him was because he was black.' "

Martin, in the same interview, agreed that there was an angry exchange, but denied that he used profanity. He also said he asked permission from the dormitory desk before going to the restroom. "Coming out of the restroom, I was rudely accosted by a group of women who were coming up the stairs behind me. ... I tried to ignore them for a short space of time. ... And eventually, when we got to the top of the stairs I became very annoyed, and expressed my annoyance to the people who were behind me."

Lefkowitz controversy, Wellesley course controversy, and libel lawsuit against Lefkowitz

Mary Lefkowitz
Mary Lefkowitz
Mary R. Lefkowitz is an American classical scholar and Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College. She is best known to non-Classicists for her anti-Afrocentrism book, Not Out of Africa . She is the widow of Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones.-Biography:Lefkowitz earned her B.A...

 was a classics professor at Wellesley, who taught courses on ancient Greek culture. In a 1992 article for The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...

, she challenged Afrocentric claims, such as the claim that Greek philosophy was plagiarized from African sources. Following publication of the New Republic piece, she and Martin became engaged in a heated disagreement, with Martin criticizing her in his department's "Africana Studies Newsletter", and she criticizing him in the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...

, and elsewhere.

As this controversy progressed, Lefkowitz discovered that students in Martin's class were assigned a book called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews is a book published in 1991 by the Nation of Islam. The book alleges that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade....

, authored by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam
Nation of Islam
The Nation of Islam is a mainly African-American new religious movement founded in Detroit, Michigan by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad in July 1930 to improve the spiritual, mental, social, and economic condition of African-Americans in the United States of America. The movement teaches black pride and...

. The book argues that Jews had a disproportionately large role in the black slave trade, a thesis that has since been condemned by mainstream historians including the American Historical Association
American Historical Association
The American Historical Association is the oldest and largest society of historians and professors of history in the United States. Founded in 1884, the association promotes historical studies, the teaching of history, and the preservation of and access to historical materials...

.
Lefkowitz ignited a controversy over the book's inclusion on the curriculum, and the controversy made national headlines in the spring of 1993. NPR
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...

, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Associated Press
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...

, among others, covered the story.

In Martin's view,
In January 1993, I was minding my own business and teaching my Wellesley College survey course on African American History when a funny thing happened. The long arm of Jewish intolerance reached into my classroom. Unknown to me, three student officers of the Jewish Hillel organization (campus B'nai B'rith stablemates of the Anti-Defamation League), sat in on my class and remained for a single period only. Their purpose was to monitor my presentation. As one of them explained in a campus meeting later, Jewish students had noticed The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews among my offerings in the school bookstore. The book documents the considerable Jewish involvement in the transatlantic African slave trade, the dissemination of which knowledge they, as Jews, considered an "anti-Semitic" and most "hateful" act.


One of Lefkowitz's responses to this controversy was an article in the September/October 1993 issue of Measure: University Centers for Rational Alternatives. In this article Lefkowitz made several allegations which Martin deemed libellous. For instance she alleged that during the October 1991 incident discussed above, Martin had called a student "a white, fucking bitch" and that "the young woman fell down as a result of his onslaught, and Martin bent over to continue his rage at her." Martin initiated a libel suit.

Martin had already sued several undergraduates for libel, as well as Wellesley College itself.
The dean of Wellesley college, Nancy Kolodny, declined to pay Lefkowitz's court costs. She reportedly said to Lefkowitz: "It's your problem. The college can't help you." In the end, the Anti-Defamation League
Anti-Defamation League
The Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects...

 provided for Lefkowitz's defense. Three other national Jewish organizations, the American Jewish Committee
American Jewish Committee
The American Jewish Committee was "founded in 1906 with the aim of rallying all sections of American Jewry to defend the rights of Jews all over the world...

, the American Jewish Congress
American Jewish Congress
The American Jewish Congress describes itself as an association of Jewish Americans organized to defend Jewish interests at home and abroad through public policy advocacy, using diplomacy, legislation, and the courts....

 and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs
Jewish Council for Public Affairs
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs is an American Jewish non-profit organization that deals with community relations. It is a coordinating round table organization of 14 other national Jewish organizations as well as 127 local Jewish federations and community relations councils...

, provided assistance. The case went through six years of appeals and counter-appeals, and was finally dismissed.

As the campus controversy wound down, Martin published a book telling his side of the story: The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront (1993). (See section below). Lefkowitz published her own views three years later in the book Not Out of Africa (Basic Books, 1996). In 2008 she published another book, History Lesson: A Race Odyssey, telling her version of the story of the lawsuit and the controversy with Martin.

Libel lawsuit against Counterpoint

In the wake of the 1993 controversy, Counterpoint, a joint MIT-Wellesley student publication, asked MIT student Avik Roy to write a "retrospective chronicling the controversy surrounding Martin since his arrival as associate professor in 1973." According to Roy, he was asked to write the article because the staff felt he would be less biased than a Wellesley student. The article by Roy was published in the fall 1993 issue of Counterpoint. It alleged that Martin "gained tenure within the Africana Studies department only after successfully suing the college for racial discrimination," and that this explained a reluctance on the part of the College to censure Martin. Martin sued Roy for libel. Roy refused to disclose the confidential sources of his information even after the case was brought to court. A Massachusetts Superior Court Judge found that a lawsuit by Martin against Wellesley had in fact occurred, but "well after his tenure, and thus could not have caused it." The suit in question was filed in 1987, and alleged racial discrimination over a merit increase. However, the 1991 libel suit was eventually dismissed, with the judge ruling that Martin did not meet his burden of proof on 4 out of 5 necessary components for proving libel. The judge found that the offending statement was "partly false, but substantially true," though inaccurate in its "implication of timing and causation." The judge agreed that Roy's conclusion, that fear of litigation would cause Wellesley to exercise 'particular restraint' when dealing with Martin, 'follows at least as strongly from the actual facts as it would from the erroneous version.'

The Jewish Onslaught

In 1993, Martin published The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront (The Majority Press). It was praised by a number of reviewers. Molefi Asante of Temple University
Temple University
Temple University is a comprehensive public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Originally founded in 1884 by Dr. Russell Conwell, Temple University is among the nation's largest providers of professional education and prepares the largest body of professional...

 called the book the best polemic by an African since the 1829 classic, David Walker's Appeal. Raymond Winbush
Raymond Winbush
Raymond A. Winbush is an American-African, scholar/activist who is Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University....

 of Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the...

 compared it to W. E. B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk. The Jewish photographer Steve Bloom
Steve Bloom
Steve Bloom is a photographer and writer. He is best known for his photography books and essays, many of which feature wildlife; as well as his large scale outdoor exhibitions called Spirit of the Wild.-Career:...

 wrote that "Martin shows that he has been the victim of a vicious slander campaign by those who use a Jewish identity demagogically...."

However, the Chair of Martin's department at Wellesley, Selwyn R. Cudjoe, labelled Martin's book "Gangsta history, meant to demean and to defame others and to bring them into disrepute, rather than to enlighten and to lead us to a more complex and sophisticated understanding of social phenomena. It ought to be labeled anti-Semitic." The majority of the Wellesley faculty signed a statement condemning Martin's work as "for its racial and ethnic stereotyping and for its anti-Semitism."

Martin's book was also criticized in a statement by the President of Wellesley College:
[The book] gratuitously attacks individuals and groups at Wellesley College through innuendo and the application of racial and religious stereotype.... Despite Professor Martin's incendiary words, and his attempt to portray Wellesley College as a repressive institution bent on silencing him, we will continue to recognize his right to express himself.

Martin and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for his teaching, research, and...

, Chair of the African and African American Studies Department and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, was critical of Martin's work, leading Martin to describe him as "Brer Gates," (see: Joel Chandler Harris
Joel Chandler Harris
Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years...

) and to write:
"Whenever the other folks have wanted anybody to beat the rest of the race over the head with, Brer Gates has been on the scene, like an HNIC ["Head Nigger in Charge"] machine. They gave him an unprecedented full page op-ed in the New York Times to attack the Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. This op-ed was actually typeset in the shape of a Star of David. There is no evidence that Gates even read the book, but he pulled together some platitudes attacking it anyway."

Martin and Holocaust deniers

Martin took part in Holocaust denier David Irving
David Irving
David John Cawdell Irving is an English writer,best known for his denial of the Holocaust, who specialises in the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany...

's "Real History Conference 2001" in Cincinnati, giving a lecture entitled "The Judaic Role in the Black Slave Trade"

Martin also served as a witness for Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel
Ernst Zündel
Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel is a German Holocaust denier and pamphleteer who was jailed several times in Canada for publishing literature which "is likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group" and for being a threat to national security, in the United States for overstaying his visa,...

 before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. Martin explained himself in an interview:
I was unaware of Zundel until his people asked me to appear as an expert witness for him. I read the materials they sent me from his website, including a pamphlet (I think the title was something like, "Did Six Million Really Die?
Did Six Million Really Die?
Did Six Million Really Die? is a Holocaust denial booklet written by British National Front member Richard Verrall, under the name Richard E. Harwood, and published by Ernst Zündel in 1974...

") which he had apparently republished, if I remember right. I stated in my brief to the tribunal that I had never studied the Jewish holocaust and had no basis for an opinion one way or another on the numbers involved. But the pamphlet seemed to me to fall within the normal range of scholarly revisionism. I pointed out that revisionism is at the very core of the historical profession and it seemed unwise to persecute people for differing historical analysis.

I was of course acutely aware of our own situation, where other historians have been whittling away with impunity at estimates of the numbers of victims of the Transatlantic slave trade. I was also mindful of the unprecedented announcement of the American Historical Association
American Historical Association
The American Historical Association is the oldest and largest society of historians and professors of history in the United States. Founded in 1884, the association promotes historical studies, the teaching of history, and the preservation of and access to historical materials...

 in the mid-1990s, that Jews were only marginally involved in the African slave trade.

This was at the behest of three influential Jewish members of the American Historical Association. This tendency to decree historical interpretation from on high, rather than letting contending views compete in the marketplace of ideas I find very alarming.

Works

  • Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, 1976, 421 pages. (ISBN 0-912469-23-4)
  • Rare Afro-Americana: A Reconstruction of the Adjer Library (with Wendy Ball), 1981.
  • Marcus Garvey, Hero: A First Biography, 1983. (ISBN 978-0912469058).
  • Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts and the Harlem, 1983. (ISBN 978-0912469010)
  • The Poetical Works of Marcus Garvey (compiled and edited), 1983.
  • In Nobody's Backyard: The Grenada Revolution in Its Own Words, edited by Tony Martin with Dessima Williams. Vol. I, The Revolution at Home. Vol. II, Facing the World, 1984.
  • African Fundamentalism: A Literary and Cultural Anthology of Garvey's Harlem Renaissance, 1991. (ISBN 978-0912469096)
  • The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront, 1993. (ISBN 978-0912469300)
  • The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond, 1998. (ISBN 978-0912469119)
  • The Progress of the African Race Since Emancipation and Prospects for the Future, 1998.
  • Amy Ashwood Garvey, Pan-Africanist, Feminist and Mrs Marcus Garvey No. 1, Or, A Tale of Two Armies, 2007.

External links

  • Tony Martin's personal website: http://www.tonymartin.net.tt
  • Video of Tony Martin's lecture, "The Judaic Role in the Black Slave Trade"
  • http://www.marquiswhoswho.net/tonymartin/,
  • http://www.blacksandjews.com/TMartin_Broadsides.html#anchor243613
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