The professor offered the following observations:
-- "Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a financial system of destruction of black people." This was "a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood" by "people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani . . ."
-- "Rich Jews" operating in Seville and Lisbon and Hamburg and Newport, R.I., and other cities financed the African slave trade.
-- Whites are "pathological," "dirty," "dastardly, devilish folks."
Leonard Jeffries, chairman of African-American studies at New York's City College, put on a surreal performance. For long stretches of his speech before an Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany last month, Jeffries made an intense and affecting case for blacks to study African history and learn the buried side of their own stories in America. But he kept veering obsessively back into a snarling racism. Strange to watch: the intelligent angels of his nature were wrestling with nasty little cretins. The cretins won a few rounds.
Diane Ravitch, Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education, is a "sophisticated Texas Jew," Jeffries said, "a debonair racist." He repeatedly called her "Miss Daisy." Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who has written against Afrocentrism, is "a weakling . . . slick and devilish." White people, including "very nice white folks," "distort history in what I call racial pathology. They are as diabolical as that." Jeffries sang out falsetto imitations of various Jews and other whites, manic little strokes of mockery and emasculation. Through it all, he invoked the liberating powers of truth. When he was finished, the audience gave him a rather tired standing ovation. He had gone on for almost two hours.
At first, Jeffries' speech escaped wider public attention. Then NY-SCAN, the state's cable-television channel, broadcast the performance, and the New York Post published a long account of it. That set off an indignant debate that had larger implications.
The first question: Are Jeffries' moments of flamboyant malice protected as exercises of academic freedom? New York Governor Mario Cuomo was not sure. First he said Jeffries' rant was "so egregious that the City University ought to take action or explain why it doesn't." Cuomo later backtracked and defended Jeffries' "freedom to abuse ((freedom))." New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal was not ambivalent. He placed Jeffries in the dreary international tribe of bigots -- Hindus paranoid about Muslims, white South Africans who proclaim black inferiority, Jew baiters everywhere. In the Washington Post, critic Jonathan Yardley wrote, "Talk such as Jeffries engaged in at Albany has nothing to do with 'ideas' -- it's bigotry, pure and simple."