Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries haunted by record of his antisemitic uncle: Who is Leonard Jeffries?

On July 20, 1991, a Black studies professor at the City College of New York named Leonard Jeffries gave a two-hour speech at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany, the New York state capital, that attacked Jews with what one observer would later describe as “snarling racism.”

Even as he sometimes alighted on the purported subject of his talk — the need for New York state to implement a less Eurocentric curriculum in its schools — he returned repeatedly to blame “rich Jews” for slavery and contemporary American racism.

Thirty years later, his nephew House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., is being forced to explain why he defended that day’s infamous, inflammatory remarks — and why he failed to disclose that defense earlier, when he had opportunities to do so.

Hakeem Jeffries had previously said he didn’t know much about what his uncle said in Albany. But earlier this month, CNN found an op-ed he wrote for the State University of New York at Binghamton college newspaper, defending Leonard Jeffries and Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader and also an unabashed antisemite.

Hakeem Jeffries also held a press conference to defend his uncle, whom the Black student union at Binghamton had invited to speak on campus, sparking outrage from those who were familiar with his views.

At a press conference on Thursday on Capitol Hill, Jeffries said he did not endorse his uncle’s views, “not now, not ever.”

Yet the GOP is continuing to press the point, releasing a video on Thursday highlighting Leonard Jeffries’s most vitriolic statements. “Hakeem Jeffries supported antisemitic remarks,” the video falsely claims. An accompanying tweet from the National Republican Congressional Committee sought to implicate the entire Democratic Party, asking, “Are House Democrats silent about Hakeem Jeffries' bigoted beliefs because they agree?”

The controversy over what Leonard Jeffries said in 1991 — and what the younger Jeffries, then a college student, wrote in response to the furious criticism that followed — is a reminder that many of the race-related debates gripping the nation today have their antecedents in decades-old tensions.

Leonard Jeffries has shown up in a remarkable number of recent controversies. While some of his views were transparently bigoted, others found traction with Black audiences hungry for a truer accounting of American history. His arguments about how the American experience should be taught are echoed in the outcry that followed conservative resistance to the College Board’s new Advanced Placement course on African American history.

But in Albany, and on many other occasions, Leonard Jeffries could not stick to those arguments. Instead, he often veered into antisemitism. “Strange to watch: the intelligent angels of his nature were wrestling with nasty little cretins. The cretins won a few rounds,” Time magazine observed at the time of his Albany speech.

Even as he became toxic to many, Leonard Jeffries continued to appeal to some. For all his grotesque and hateful excesses, he could also speak forthrightly about the pain many Black Americans were feeling. There had been progress since the days of Jim Crow, but the beating of Rodney King, the rise of the white supremacist David Duke, the ravages of the war on drugs — these were all evidence that something was profoundly amiss.

In the fall of 1991, a Harvard undergraduate, Alvin Bragg — today the Manhattan district attorney waging a legal battle against Donald Trump — organized and moderated a dialogue between Black and Jewish students to ease tensions over a talk by Leonard Jeffries.

During her recent Senate confirmation hearing, current U.S. Deputy Attorney General Kristen Clarke had to explain why she had written an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson in 1994 seemingly endorsing Jeffries’s controversial view that the melanin in darker skin confers greater physical strength and intelligence.

The furor over the Jeffries speech resurfaces at a time when tensions between Black Americans and Jewish Americans are running especially high. Last year, the professional basketball player Kyrie Irving, then of the Brooklyn Nets, was suspended after endorsing an antisemitic documentary that repeats many of the inaccurate claims Jeffries espoused.

Born and raised in Newark, N.J., Leonard Jeffries watched his home city explode in mass unrest following the 1967 beating of a Black driver by white police officers. Newark was also the hometown of Philip Roth, the Jewish novelist who explored race relations in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book "American Pastoral," and of Amiri Baraka, the poet and activist, who has also faced charges of antisemitism.

His son, Ras Baraka, is now Newark’s mayor. Much like Hakeem Jeffries, the younger Baraka has been praised by moderates as a pragmatist.

Leonard Jeffries went to Lafayette College, where he joined a Jewish fraternity and became, as he described himself, “the King of the Jews.” (After he became a figure of national notoriety, many of his classmates expressed dismay at his evolution.)

He worked in Africa, earned a doctorate from Columbia University and joined the City College faculty in 1969, eventually becoming the founding chair of its Black studies department. The discipline was relatively new, and Jeffries helped to expand the department while continuing his own research into African history.

“Dr. Jeffries became a popular lecturer on campus but rarely published his ideas for peer review,” the New York Times would later write.

But with time, his views were becoming increasingly extreme. In an appearance on Geraldo Rivera’s daytime talk show, Jeffries said that “AIDS coming out of a laboratory and finding itself located in certain populations certainly has to be looked at as part of a conspiratorial process,” according to the Times.

In 1988, state Education Commissioner Thomas Sobol appointed Jeffries to a panel that would review how history was taught in New York’s schools, with an eye to making the curriculum more accurate and inclusive. Jeffries said the work encountered resistance from whites, which soured him on the possibility of change.

“The reaction has been that it’s anti-American to raise these issues,” he would later tell the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose. He added that if educators had been willing to go along with the panel’s recommendations, he would never have resorted to the inflammatory statements that would make him infamous.

In his Albany speech, he decided to take out his frustrations on Jews, who have often served as scapegoats throughout world history. “Everyone knows rich Jews helped finance the slave trade,” he said, in a favorite theme of his that grossly misinterpreted history.

The speech was broadcast on a local public television station, but it did not draw notice until early August, when its contents were described in a New York Post article. Jeffries finally gained attention for his ideas, but the attention was of the wrong variety. “In New York, a Bigoted Man on Campus,” ran a Washington Post headline on Aug. 12, 1991.

But the Zelig-like frequency with which he continues to appear in national affairs — Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., was called out by Fox News for having worked as a youth pastor at a Harlem church when it hosted Jeffries in the 1990s — suggests that his appeal has been underestimated.

The rise of assertive Afrocentrism in the latter decades of the 20th century mirrored broader recognition among African Americans that, as much as the civil rights movement had inspired change, racism was deeply entrenched in American society.

At the same time, the grievances of middle-class whites were finding their own expression in the archetype of the "angry white male," embodied in such personalities as radio host Rush Limbaugh. Along with Jeffries, City College employed Michael Levin, a white philosophy professor who promoted the racist trope that African Americans are less intelligent than whites.

A week after the Albany speech became national news, a motorcade carrying the leader of an Orthodox Jewish sect struck and killed Gavin Cato, a young Black child, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

The ensuing riot left a Jewish student dead. It also made the ideas that Jeffries had been espousing for years more attractive to some. “Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said at Cato’s funeral.

Hakeem Jeffries had been raised in Crown Heights and had just graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton at the time of the riot.

He has previously claimed not to remember the controversy over his uncle’s speech. “My father made a deliberate decision to try to shield us from that controversy, because he was very concerned as to how it could just impact our well-being, our focus, because it was an intense situation,” Jeffries said in a 2019 podcast interview.

Since entering Congress a decade ago, Jeffries has been a steadfast supporter of Israel, whose security is of the utmost importance to many American Jews. And despite the recent CNN revelations, he continues to retain the support of Jewish members of Congress. “He and I have traveled to Israel together. He is a friend of mine, a friend of the Jewish people, and a friend of Israel,” Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., told Jewish Insider in an article published this month.

A spokeswoman for Hakeem Jeffries, Christiana Stephenson, told Yahoo News that he “has consistently been clear that he does not share the controversial views espoused by his uncle over 30 years ago.”

Attempts to reach Leonard Jeffries were unsuccessful.

Once the Albany speech was publicized by the press, City College moved to strip him of the Black studies department chairmanship. Jeffries did not help his own case, continuing to embarrass his employer even after the Albany speech. In late 1991, he threatened a Black reporter for the Harvard Crimson and used a homophobic slur to describe another scholar.

The following year, City College removed Jeffries from his chairmanship, without firing him outright. He described himself as the victim of an “academic lynching.” The ensuing court battle would last for two more years, but in 1995 the courts ultimately sided with City College.

Then, in 1996, City College moved to eliminate the Black studies and other ethnically focused departments. “The motive for this is very clear,” one Black studies professor lamented to the New York Times. “They are punishing Leonard Jeffries, and they're making an attack on the dissemination of African history and culture in the academic marketplace.”

Jeffries would dispute that he was an antisemite, while continuing to make antisemitic statements. In a 1994 speech in Newark, he called Jews “skunks.” In 1996, he warned employees at New York’s housing agency about white people and suggested they should eat nonwhite foods more frequently.

When, in 2013, Hakeem Jeffries was inaugurated as a House member at a ceremony in Brooklyn, Leonard Jeffries was there, proudly cheering on his Washington-bound nephew.