THE RECORD
SOUTHEAST BERGEN
Scholar builds up African influence
Sunday, February 25, 2007
By ELIZABETH LLORENTE
STAFF WRITER
Leonard Jeffries Jr., the controversial scholar, told a crowd of about 50 on Saturday that racial and ethnic minorities need to take credit for their contributions to world civilization.
Jeffries, a Teaneck resident, said the role of Africans in building the pyramids of Egypt and inventing mathematical and literary concepts has been suppressed or denied by society, which credits people of European descent with virtually every milestone in civilization.
"Most of us have only one track" from which to draw historical information, Jeffries said, "and that is the European track."
He spoke of the genius behind the development of the pyramids, and how the talent and skills and intellect that inspired them were a symbol of the greatness among people of African descent.
"One pyramid had two million large stones," he said. "Everybody claims the pyramids for themselves. [But] there were no Romans there, no Greeks; only people of color were in the high culture and high civilization of that time. Only people of color were conceiving pyramids, temples."
Jeffries made national headlines in the early 1990s when he lost the chairmanship of African-American studies at the City College of New York after saying in a speech that "Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a system for the destruction of black people." Jeffries unsuccessfully challenged CUNY's decision in court. |
|
The firestorms that have followed him over the years have done nothing to soften his rhetoric, as Jeffries, 70, demonstrated in his speech Saturday at the Technology Resources Center.
He blamed a pervasive "curriculum of exclusion" for the little or no credit Africans and other non-Europeans have received for their historical contributions.
"This country was founded on [the idea] that white folks were superior and black people were not even human," he said.
The early European settlers in the United States were "illegal immigrants," he said.
"The richness of this country came through the blood, sweat and tears of African people," he said, adding that "old lies are persistent and people want to maintain them."
Jeffries' speech was capped by the unveiling of a large, brightly-colored quilt that bore the images of three of the pyramids at the Giza Plateau in Egypt.
An audience member, Englewood community leader and businessman Isaiah M. Jefferson, said he admired Jeffries for saying aloud what many minorities are thinking.
"He has said things when it hasn't been popular to say them," Jefferson said. "He's trying to educate and set up the next generation, and telling them the truth that they're not being taught in school."
E-mail: llorente@northjersey.com |
