For years, Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has told a similar story: he was off at college and shielded from controversies surrounding his uncle, Black studies professor Leonard Jeffries, who eventually lost his job over incendiary comments about Jewish people. Hakeem Jeffries has said he had only a “vague recollection” of the controversy, saying he couldn’t even recall coverage of it in local press.
But a CNN KFile review of material from a 30-year-old college campus incident sharply undermines Jeffries’ claims.
While Jeffries was a college student at Binghamton University in upstate New York, the Black Student Union, in which Jeffries was an executive board member, invited his uncle to speak on campus after his inflammatory comments caused an uproar.
And in a previously unreported college editorial, Jeffries defended his uncle along with Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan, writing, “Do you think that a ruling elite would promote individuals who would seek to dismantle their vice like grip on power?” He added that they were unfairly targeted by “White media” for challenging “the longstanding distortion of history.”
Leonard Jeffries faced widespread backlash in the early 1990s after comments he made about the involvement of “rich Jews” in the African slave trade and “a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood” of Jewish executives who he said were responsible for denigrating Black Americans in films.
“Dr. Leonard Jeffries and Minister Louis Farrakhan have come under intense fire,” wrote Jeffries in February 1992. “Where do you think their interests lie? Dr. Jeffries has challenged the existing white supremist educational system and long standing distortion of history. His reward has been a media lynching complete with character assassinations and inflammatory erroneous…
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