Leonard Jeffries Jr., the Afrocentric-education proponent whose racially charged remarks ignited a national controversy last summer, has been replaced as head of the black-studies department at City College of New York.
The board of trustees at City University, which oversees the City College campus, voted last week to replace Mr. Jeffries with Edmund W. Gordon, the former chairman of the African-American studies department at Yale University and a professor emeritus of psychology. Mr. Gordon, who retired from Yale last year, will assume his new post on July 1 and stay in the job for two years.
Mr. Jeffries gained national attention last summer after making a speech in which he charged that “rich Jews’’ helped finance the early American slave trade and that Jews and Italians in Hollywood conspired to make movies denigrating black people. (See Education Week, Sept. 4, 1991.) He has also advanced a theory that black people are superior to whites because of the greater amount of melanin in their skin.
Mr. Jeffries had served as a paid consultant to New York State’s effort to re-examine its treatment of minorities in the school curriculum.
In the wake of the controversy, the board in October voted to extend Mr. Jeffries contract as chairman until June, rather than to reappoint him for the normal three-year term. Mr. Jeffries has reportedly said he will file a lawsuit against the university.
