Tony Martin (born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, February 21, 1942) was an American professor 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, his written works and statements about the involvement and responsibility of Jews in the American slave trade, which echo allegations made by the Nation of Islam, have been a source of ongoing controversy.
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Martin received a B.Sc. honours degree in economics at the University of Hull (England) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Michigan State University.[1]
Martin began his teaching career at the University of Michigan-Flint, the Cipriani Labour College (Trinidad) and St. Mary's College (Trinidad). He began teaching at Wellesley in 1973, became tenured in 1975, and became a full professor in 1979.[2]
He is also a barrister-at-law from Gray's Inn, London.[1]
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.[3]
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.
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."[4]
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.' "[5]
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."[5]
Mary Lefkowitz was a classics professor at Wellesley, who taught courses on ancient Greek culture. In a 1992 article for The New Republic, 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",[6] and she criticizing him in the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Republic, and elsewhere.[7][8][9]
As this controversy progressed, Lefkowitz discovered that students in Martin's class were assigned a book called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,[10] authored by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam. 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.[11] Lefkowitz ignited a controversy over the book's inclusion on the curriculum, and the controversy made national headlines in the spring of 1993. NPR, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Associated Press, among others, covered the story.[7][12]
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.[13]
One of Lefkowitz's responses to this controversy was an article in the September/October 1993 issue of Measure: University Centers for Rational Alternatives.[14] 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.[5] [15] Martin had already sued several undergraduates for libel, as well as Wellesley College itself.[7] 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 provided for Lefkowitz's defense. Three other national Jewish organizations, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, provided assistance. The case went through six years of appeals and counter-appeals, and was finally dismissed.[16][17]
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).[9] (See section below). Lefkowitz published her own views three years later in the book Not Out of Africa (Basic Books, 1996).[18] 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.[19]
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.'[4][20]
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 called the book the best polemic by an African since the 1829 classic, David Walker's Appeal.[21] Raymond Winbush of Vanderbilt University compared it to W. E. B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk.[22] The Jewish photographer Steve Bloom wrote that "Martin shows that he has been the victim of a vicious slander campaign by those who use a Jewish identity demagogically...."[23]
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."[24] 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."[25]
Martin's book was also criticized in a statement by the President of Wellesley College:
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 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, was critical of Martin's work, leading Martin to describe him as "Brer Gates," (see: Joel Chandler Harris) 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."[27]
Martin took part in Holocaust denier David Irving's "Real History Conference 2001" in Cincinnati, giving a lecture entitled "The Judaic Role in the Black Slave Trade"[28]
Martin also served as a witness for Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel 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?") 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 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.[29]