Leonard Jeffries

Leonard Jeffries Jr. (born January 19, 1937) is an African-American professor of Black Studies at the City College of New York, part of the City University of New York. He was born and raised in Newark, NJ where as a young man, he first developed his leadership skills and Pan-African consciousness.

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, he has urged that public school syllabi be made less Eurocentric.

His claims that Jewish businessmen financed the slave trade and used the movie industry to hurt black people, and that whites are "ice people" while Africans are "sun people," received national publicity in the early 1990s. Jeffries was discharged from his position as chairman of the Black Studies Department at CUNY, leading to a lengthy legal battle ending in the courts supporting the college's right to remove him from the position due to his incendiary remarks.

Jeffries attended Lafayette College for his undergraduate work. While in Lafayette, Jeffries pledged, and was accepted into, Pi Lambda Phi, a fraternity with a large number of Jewish members. In his senior year, Jeffries was elected president of the fraternity. After graduating with honors in 1959, Jeffries won a Rotary International fellowship to the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and then returned in 1961 to 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 CCNY in 1969 and received his doctorate from Columbia 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 became the chairman of the new Black Studies Department.

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