Before his July 20, 1991 speech, Dr. Leonard Jeffries was already known for his teaching that blacks are racially superior to whites because blacks, whom he calls “sun people,” have more melanin in their skin than whites, whom he calls “ice people.”In November, 1990, Dr. Jeffries organized the “Second National Conference on the Infusion of African and African-American Content in the High School Curriculum” in Atlanta. Over 1,000 predominately black educators from around the country attended. According to the November 26, 1990 New Republic, the Atlanta conference reflected “the conviction that all Western knowledge is a corruption of Egyptian, i.e. black African thought [and therefore] schoolchildren, black and white, should be taught everything from a black African perspective.”Dr. Jeffries declares: “All of the human race is African. We know for a fact that the ancient Hebrews came into the Nile Valley. They came into an African context. Thesis, antithesis. They came in without ten commandments, they went out with ten commandments.”Speaking at the taxpayer-funded Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany, New York in July 1991, Jeffries complained about a “systematic” and “unrelenting” attack “coming from the Jewish community,” against blacks. “Russian Jewry,” he stated, “had a particular control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a system of destruction for black people.”During the same speech, Jeffries said that he had once headed a Jewish fraternity in college. Boasting that he had then been known as “King of the Jews”. But according to the President of Greek Life at the college that Jeffries attended the school has never had a Jewish fraternity.“Let me clarify my views,” Dr. Jeffries said, after a long exegesis on the role of Jews in the African slave trade, “if they say we are destroying Western civilization with our proposals, then I say let it happen quickly, because Western civilization is nothing more than an institutionalized, sophisticated form of barbarism.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is under fire for defending his antisemitic uncle and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan after an op-ed he wrote in college over 30 years ago resurfaced this week.After he was elected to Congress in 2013, Jeffries told the Wall Street Journal that he only had a “vague recollection” of the controversy surrounding his uncle, Leonard Jeffries — a former college professor and department chair of Black Studies at the City University of New York.

“Do you think that a ruling elite would promote individuals who would seek to dismantle their vice like grip on power?” Jeffries wrote in the piece, published in the Black Student Union’s newspaper, The Vanguard.“Dr. Leonard Jeffries and Minister Louis Farrakhan have come under intense fire,” Jeffries continued. “Where do you think their interests lie? Dr. Jeffries has challenged the existing white supremacist educational system and long standing distortion of history. His reward has been a media lynching complete with character assassinations and inflammatory erroneous accusations.”Jeffries’ office maintained on Wednesday that he does not agree with his uncle’s view and believes in “bringing communities together.”