Professor Tony Martin
TONY MARTIN has taught at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, since 1973.
He was tenured in 1975 and has been a full professor of Africana Studies
since 1979. Prior to coming to Wellesley he taught at the University of
Michigan-Flint, the Cipriani Labour College (Trinidad) and St. Mary's College
(Trinidad). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota,
Brandeis University, Brown University and The Colorado College. He also
spent a year as an honorary research fellow at the University of the West
Indies, Trinidad.
Professor Martin has authored or compiled and edited eleven books, including
Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts and the Harlem Renaissance
and the classic study of the Garvey Movement, Race First: the Ideological
and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement
Association. In 1965 he qualified as a barrister-at-law at the Honourable
Society of Gray's Inn (London). He did his M.A. and Ph.D. in history at
Michigan State University and the B.Sc. honours degree in economics at the
University of Hull (England).
Professor Martin is currently working on biographies of three Caribbean
women Amy Ashwood Garvey, Audrey Jeffers and Trinidad's Kathleen
Davis (Auntie Kay). He is also nearing completion of The
Afro-Trinidadian: Endangered Species/Oh, What a Nation and a study of
European Jewish immigration to Trinidad in the 1930's.
Incident at Wellesley:
Jewish Attack on Black Academics
by Tony Martin
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 hour and ten minutes undercover convinced these three young Jews that
I was teaching this book as a legitimate historical work. They seemed to
think that it belonged rather in the realm of hate literature.
There appears to have been some prior collusion between the Hillel students
and their adult counterpart, the Anti-Defamation League, for Hillel almost
immediately began passing out ADL materials targeting the book. These included,
inevitably, an ADL reprint of Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars
by Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (New York Times,
20 July, 1992), African America's most notorious Judaeophile. In the weeks
and months to come, Gates would be quoted in nearly every attack on my use
of the book, as proof that all respectable, distinguished and
right thinking African American scholars condemned it. The Jews unilaterally
anointed Gates with the mantle of head African American scholar in charge
of Black academia. He became, in their contrived and wishful thinking, the
personification of the entire African American community.
The Hillel activists left my class and headed straight for the president,
dean and associate dean of the college. They then went to the current chair
of my own department, Africana Studies. Like their elders (for example in
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, by whom Hillel operatives
are formally trained in the art of deception and dirty tricks), they evinced
a bulldog-like instinct for going after the jugular of their intended victims.
For the last three decades of Jewish assaults on Black progress, that jugular
has usually meant the economic livelihood of Black people.
By the time that four of the Hillel executive and their rabbi director came
to see me they had already mobilized those they perceived of as capable
of doing me grievous economic harm. Their task was made considerably less
arduous by the fact that the dean of the college, incoming acting president,
outgoing chair of the board of trustees, incoming chair of the board of
trustees, head and deputy head of the student government, most of the faculty
holding endowed chairs and a goodly portion of the tenured faculty, not
to mention sundry other persons in high positions, were all Jews. The dean
of the college is also on the advisory board of the Friends of Wellesley
Hillel.
Dr. Martin's Self-Defense
In January 1993, on the eve of the Jewish onslaught against me (for teaching
that Jews were implicated in the African slave trade), I already had some
interest in Black-Jewish relations. It is difficult not to, if one teaches
African American history. I had also done some research on Jewish refugee
immigration to Trinidad in the 1930's and '40's. This research was facilitated
by the cordial cooperation of Jewish informants in two Caribbean countries.
United States Jews encountered in the course of the research displayed the
gamut of reactions, from friendliness to suspicion to hostility. The idea
of a Black man turning up at a Jewish archive to research Jewish history
proved unnerving to some. (On the other hand, Jewish scholars are a familiar
sight at Black archives, not only as researchers but sometimes even as staff
archivists. One of the most prestigious of the Black archival repositories,
the Moorland- Spingarn Collection of Howard University, is actually part-named
after a Jew).
At one of the Jewish archives I visited, the lady in charge characteristically
put me through the appropriate litmus test. Do you know Len Jeffries?
she asked, with the mien of one presiding over an inquisition. I wonder
if knowing Len Jeffries automatically disqualifies me from using these archives,
I mused to myself. But, like George Washington, I could not tell a lie,
so I was constrained to be forthcoming. Yes, I know him, I replied.
We are professional colleagues. I have known him for many years.
She was visibly taken aback by this answer and I feared the worst.
She regained her composure, however, and the interrogation continued. Have
you read The Secret Relationship Between Blacks
and JewsI have heard of it, I replied truthfully,
but I have not read it. Funny enough, though, I passed someone selling
it on the sidewalk just a few minutes ago. My reading of the book
was still a few months into the future, but already I could not fathom what
all the fuss was about. If it is established, I suggested to
her, that white people enslaved Africans, and if Jews were an important
part of white society, then why should anyone be upset by a book that illustrates
the Jewish role in the slave trade?
My innocent question now appears to have been imbued with prophetic insight.
Or maybe it was simply a case of famous last words. The fact that I cannot
remember with precision what her response was, in an otherwise clearly recollected
conversation, probably reflects the imprecision of her answer. She could
not come up with a coherent rationale for her denunciation of the book.
As I reflect in hindsight on that conversation, with the benefit of six
months of the Jewish onslaught to guide me, it seems as if the major Jewish
agencies issue edicts, as it were. Then the Jewish rank and file simply
fall in line. Theirs not to make reply,/Theirs not to reason why,/
Theirs but to do and die.... The power of the Jewish leadership over
their constituency is impressive indeed, the presence of some dissenting
voices notwithstanding.
But our conversation was not over yet. It was to take an even more unexpected
turn. Have you heard of the Crown Heights riots? she enquired,
referring to tensions between the Black and Hasidic Jewish communities in
Brooklyn, New York. A confrontation had been triggered by the unpunished
killing of young Gavin Cato and the maiming of his cousin Angela Cato by
a Hasidic vehicle, as the children played on the sidewalk in front of their
house. A Jewish student, Yankel Rosenbaum, was killed in the ensuing scuffles.
Yankel Rosenbaum was doing research right here, she said. He
was in here every day, reading the files, just like you. He sat at the same
table where we have placed your materials. Even with my own personal
Jewish onslaught still many months into the future, this revelation proved
a sobering one to me. And as I ponder it with the benefit of a tempestuous
hindsight, I wonder what inscrutable fate brought me to this archive, to
this conversation, to Yankel Rosenbaum's table, at a time when my authorship
of a book called The Jewish Onslaught would
have seemed a bizarre improbability.
I could not know then that I would ere long be plunged into an intense reading
of Jewish and Black-Jewish history, covering many lands and historical periods,
as I sought to bring to my situation a more wide-ranging perspective. The
onslaught of the last six months now threatens to turn me into an expert
on Jewish history. For that I must thank the purveyors of intolerance with
whom I have had to do battle of late.
What I offer here is an involved yet detached look at the onslaught against
me, from my unique vantage point as both intended victim and historian.
This is written in the heat of battle. Perhaps time, further study and more
reflection may either modify or enrich the analysis offered here. But the
immediacy of analysis can only be captured now.
Over the last six months I have been fairly deluged with articles, books,
newspaper clippings, letters, unpublished documents and references for further
perusal. As if obeying the orders of an unseen force, well-wishers (known
and unknown) have seen to it that my crash course in Black-Jewish history
should not be wanting in resource materials. Even the senders of hate and
hostile mail have fit into the plan, for their clippings have been useful
and informative.
Editorial Statement
Barely a week after the publication of aThe Jewish
Onslaught, Wellesley's new president, Diana Chapman Walsh, has taken
the extraordinary step of issuing a formal denunciation of the new book.
In a December 9, 1993 statement disseminated to all students, faculty, staff,
alumnae and friends of the college she declares as follows
We are profoundly disturbed and saddened by Professor Martin's new
book because it gratuitously attacks individuals and groups at Wellesley
College through innuendo and the application of racial and religious stereotype.
Due to President Walsh's newness on campus, it can plausibly be surmised
that she has relied heavily on the opinions of her advisors. The baleful
influence of these shadowy figures is plainly evident in the palpable one-sidedness
of the presidential proclamation, in its reliance on sweeping derogatory
generalizations and in its inability to support its assertions with documentation
of any sort. In all these ways and more the presidential statement is reflective
of official and quasi-official approaches of the last twelve months.
Our new president has squandered a golden opportunity to bring fresh leadership
and even-handed tolerance to the present controversy.
Martin on the Presidential Denunciation of The Jewish Onslaught
The Jewish Onslaught was published as a response to the unprincipled
attacks, defamatory statements, assaults on my livelihood and physical threats
directed against me for several months. These emanated principally from
the Jewish community and its agents and were triggered by my classroom use
of a work detailing Jewish involvement in the African slave trade. In The
Jewish Onslaught I sought to put my subjective situation into
the context of deteriorating Black-Jewish relations of recent decades. I
also attempted to evaluate the tactics used against me in the context of
the well-documented dirty tricks that the Jewish groups have used against
me in the context of the well-documented dirty tricks that the Jewish groups
have used against Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, David Dinkins, Minister Louis
Farrakhan, Len Jeffries, Black parents in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (Brooklyn)
and any number of Euro-American individuals and organizations.
The Jewish Onslaught is a book of analysis supported by normal scholarly
documentation. There is not a single stereoptype or generalization
in it that is not buttressed by evidence, either from my personal experience
of the last year or from the historical record. I challenge President Walsh
to move from her broad derogatory generalizations to specific instances
to prove otherwise.
President Walsh, like many of the Jewish spokespersons, has a problem with
my recurrent and allegedly gratuitous utilization
of racial or religious identification of individuals.... This
is her way of saying that Black people are not allowed to respond to Jews
as Jews. Even after being attacked primarily by the Hillel Foundation,
American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Congress,
Jewish Community Relations Council and every Jewish newspaper and spokesperson
for miles around, I am supposed to maintain the fiction that the onslaught
against me is ethnically and religiously indeterminate.
A recent article in Black Books Bulletin mentions over twenty books
on Black-Jewish relations in the personal library of its author. The author
is aware of only two books by Blacks on the subject. If President Walsh
(and the Jewish community) are to have their way, then this will forever
remain a one-way discourse. I therefore ask again, as I asked in The
Jewish Onslaught, What makes Jews so special? By what dispensation
in Adam's will do they enjoy monopolistic privileges over a debate that
concerns Blacks as well as Jews? Who has placed them beyond the reach of
scholarly enquiry and ethnic identification?
President Walsh claims that The Jewish Onslaught violates the
basic principles of, among other things, the norms of civil
discourse. Yet, in her zeal to uncover innuendo in my
work she seems to have missed the blatant lack of civility in the many articles
attacking me. Is she not aware of Professor Marcellus Andrews' Wellesley
News reference to me as a racist Pied Piper? Did no one
show her his description of Wellesley's Black women as intellectually
weak and morally lazy? Did Mary Lefkowitz,
Mellon Professor in the Humanities, neglect to send President Walsh a complimentary
copy of her article in Measure (No. 118, September/October 1993),
wherein she maliciously and scurrilously alleged that I called a student
a white fucking bitch? Lefkowitz alleged further that The
young woman fell down as a result of his onslaught and Martin bent over
to continue his rage at her. Did President Walsh not see, in her reading
of The Jewish Onslaught, the text of a racist cartoon by a Wellesley
alumna in the Boston Jewish Times? The cartoonist designated Black
women as Ms. Washington (no different than the Hymietown
remark that Jews claimed to be so scandalized by) and seemed to suggest
that Black students be taught from the works of segregationists, Ku Kluxers
and pseudo-scientific racists. Did President Walsh not read the Jewish hate
mail reproduced in The Jewish Onslaught ? I hate niggers to
my very bone marrow, ran a typical sentence. Not all Jews debate
apes. Some of us want them all to die. I have been a veritable oasis
of civility in the present debate.
I agree with Justice Holmes, as quoted by President Walsh The
best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in
the competition of the market. The Jewish onslaught has consistently
striven to stifle the competition of the market by its defamatory
rantings and its demands for my dismissal. The present presidential proclamation
regrettably ranges itself alongside this ignoble campaign.
But the competition of the market has yet managed to assert
itself, as can be seen in the steadily shifting positions of the onslaught.
From an initial denial that Jews had any role in African slavery at all,
there slowly emerged a reluctant admission of minor and peripheral involvement.
As the debate intensified and the Jewish denial of the undeniable threatened
to expose its adherents to ridicule, the Washington Post (first among
major newspapers, to the best of my knowledge), was finally permitted to
admit the full extent of Jewish culpability. In a carefully staged (and
not at all pro-Black article) of October 17, 1993 the deniers of Jewish
involvement in the African holocaust were shown to be as wrong as they could
be.
The present controversy demands honest dialogue, not crude attempts at demonization.
If President Walsh desires to extricate herself from the hole into which
she has fallen, let her collaborate with me (and with interested students),
on the convening at Wellesley College of a serious scholarly conference
on the role of Jews in the African slave trade. She can invite Skip Gates,
Cornel West and anyone else acceptable to the Jewish establishment to argue
their case. I will nominate an equal number of scholars to defend the perspective
which I endorse. The spirit of Justice Holmes will be lifted.
As my mother used to say, One hand can't clap. As Ray Charles
was wont to soulfully sing, It takes two to tango.
Anti Martin Hatred
Internet Threats
Amherst · An Internet computer message suggested the arming of Jews
to kill Blacks immediately following a scholarly address on Black history
to the University of Massachusetts community. This threat of violence appeared
in the Discussion Group for the National Faculty Network, a collection of
college professors throughout the United States. The message was posted
to the network the night of the lecture in which Wellesley College professor
Tony Martin outlined the oppressive structure of the African slave trade.
The computer mailbox address indicated that the writer is a Jewish professor
at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts who attended the event:
Shalom all. I am still shaking right now....I just walked in the
door....I know with the Hillel here we are together in a great community
working on a response to the disgusting events of tonight...but for
now I am asking all of you for a response. Learn to operate AK-47, and have
good supply of ammunition, so you will be ready when they come to kill us....
And how do we stop these anti-semites from speaking? I doubt there is a
way to stop them from speaking. They are more numerous and more prepared
to use raw brute force. Even if you could take them to court and win an
injuction against these bastards, it will just be seized upon by the rest
of the blacks as further evidence of a Jewish conspiracy against blacks.
According to campus police, the gathering, sponsored by the Black student
organization, was completely peaceful and the participants were law-abiding.
Martin is the author of thirteen books and numerous articles and is the
world's foremost expert on the Marcus Garvey movement. According to sources,
Professor Martin was immediately informed of the threat but would not comment
on security operations.
Jew stalks Black professor
Russian-Jewish stalker claiming to be on a mission threatened
to attack Professor Tony Martin at his Wellesley College office. Martin,
whose best-selling book The Jewish
Onslaught examines the role of organized Jewry in a slanderous attack
on Afrocentricity, was unharmed and not present during the April 21 incident.
A profusely sweating Alexander Nechaevsky, 34, told campus police
that after viewing a televised lecture by Dr. Martin he found him to be
rude and a racist and came to confront him about
his views. In the lecture Martin outlined the Jewish origin of the Hamitic
Myth which claims that Black humans are cursed black by God and which provided
justification for the African slave trade.
Nechaevsky ranted that he was not a Jewish wimp and that he was from
Russia where they know how to handle things. He then conversed at
length with a Jewish professor who has led the campus onslaught against
Martin.
Martin said that he is not surprised at the attack. Part of the Jewish
onslaught against Black thinkers is to create an atmosphere of intolerance
which leads to violent confrontations.
Police ejected Nechaevsky and banned him from Wellesley College property.
Later, Martin's office received telephone threats saying that Tony
Martin better watch his step.