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Charlie Rose Speaks to Ɔbenfo Leonard Jeffries The Jews Involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Tr Kwabena Ofori Osei 37 Views • 2 years ago

- In the very first episode of the show, Charlie talks to City College professor Leonard Jeffries about a controversial speech he delivered on July 20, 1991. -- Journalists Jerry Nachman, Utrice Leid, and Sam Roberts debate Professor Jeffries's contentious ideas. -- David Grubin discusses his four-hour PBS documentary about former President Lyndon Baines Johnson, "LBJ: The American Experience." --Charlie remembers jazz musician Miles Davis with performance clips of the legendary trumpeter. (Not Included because of music rights that we do not own or have permission to utilize) People in this videoUtrice LeidJerry NachmanDavid GrubinLeonard JeffriesMiles DavisSam Roberts** Link to program transcript https://charlierose.com/videos/28319Leonard Jeffries and his ideas about race, history, and cultural politics have caused a raging controversy both in the halls of academia and in American society at large. Vilified in some quarters as a racist and demagogue, Jeffries has also been hailed as an educator who uses his classroom to raise the consciousness of African Americans. His career as chairman of the Department of African-American Studies at the City College of New York has “given a sense of urgency to the notion of expanding African-American studies in classrooms everywhere,” according to Emerge correspondent Michael H. Cottman. “It also has highlighted the growing concern for … black scholars who are now subject to ridicule and branded as incompetents and anti-Semites, as well as being second-guessed by those who object to blacks reexamining world history and offering a dramatically different perspective on the African impact on society.”In his capacity as a college professor and also as a speaker in public forums, Jeffries has stood as an exponent of several controversial theories: that the presence of different levels of melanin—a skin coloration pigment—has caused biological and psychological differences between blacks and whites; that the slave trade was run and financed by wealthy Europeans, including Jews; and that Africa’s role as a force in the creation of modern Western civilization has been systematically undermined by white, Eurocentric historians.Leonard Jeffries was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, the older of two sons in a close-knit blue-collar family. “It was an extraordinarily happy home,” he recalled in New York. “I grew up with the idea of becoming a lawyer to save the race in the civil-rights movement and to be mayor of Newark.” Like other black youngsters coming of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jeffries faced racism from his white schoolmates as well as from some of his teachers, but he buried his rage and strove to excel. He was popular enough to be elected president of his grammar school class and later president of his high school class.Jeffries won a scholarship to Lafayette College and arrived there in 1955 as one of four black students on the campus that year. An honors student almost from the outset of his undergraduate years, he decided to pledge the only fraternity on campus that would accept black members: Pi Lambda Phi, the Jewish fraternity. He was accepted and spent the last three years at Lafayette rooming with Jewish friends and participating actively in the fraternity’s affairs. “The Jews in that frat operated on the African value system—communal, cooperative, and collective,” Jeffries recounted in New York. “It was us against the world. We had very strong relationships because I was the leader…. I was trying to make them men.”In his senior year Jeffries was named president of Pi Lambda Phi, the first black in history to hold that position in the fraternity. The honor further helped to defray his college expenses by paying for his food and lodging. It also provided Jeffries with an ironic title that amused him greatly. “They called the president a Rex—I had to go through college as king of the Jews,” he told New York. “But I managed it. I managed it. Me and my Jews knew what we were about.”Graduating with honors in 1959, Jeffries won a Rotary International fellowship to study at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Upon his return to New York in 1961 he enrolled in the graduate program at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs. As he worked toward his master’s and doctorate degrees, he supported himself by working for Operation Crossroads Africa, a private organization that developed community projects in Africa. Jeffries’s association with Operation Crossroads Africa provided him with opportunities to spend time in Guinea, Mali, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast. In 1965, the year he earned his master’s degree, he became the company’s program coordinator for West Africa.*** Read More about Professor leonard Jeffries Here https://www.encyclopedia.com/e....ducation/news-wires- https://www.c-span.org/person/....?35272/LeonardJeffri