Tony Martin (professor)

This article is about the Africana Studies professor. For the mathematics professor, see Donald A. Martin.

Tony Martin
Martin (from a book cover)[year needed]
Born
Anthony Martin

(1942-02-21)21 February 1942
Port of Spain, Colony of Trinidad and Tobago
Died17 January 2013(2013-01-17) (aged 70)
Cocorite, Diego Martin, Trinidad and Tobago
EducationGray's Inn; University of Hull; Michigan State University
Occupation(s)Academic, professor
Known forActivism, black nationalism, Pan-Africanism
RelativesAudrey Jeffers (aunt), Henry Martin (brother)
Websitewww.professortonymartin.com

Tony Martin (21 February 1942 – 17 January 2013)[1] was a Trinidad and Tobago-born scholar of Africana Studies. From 1973 to 2007 he worked at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and over the course of his career published more than ten books and a range of scholarly articles.

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Martin moved to the United Kingdom, where he studied law at Gray's Inn, London, and then economics at the University of Hull. Relocating to the United States, he completed a PhD on the Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey at Michigan State University in 1973. That year, he was employed as an associate professor at Wellesley College, where he was a founding member of its Africana Studies Department. During the latter part of the 1970s and 1980s he published several books on Garvey and Garveyism. In 1987 he sued his employer for racial discrimination and in 1991 was accused of harassing female students, although he denied the allegation.

Among the subjects that Martin pursued was the place of Jews in the Atlantic slave trade. During the 1990s, he came under public criticism for encouraging his students to read The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a book compiled by the Nation of Islam that was widely regarded as antisemitic. That decade, he also entered into a publicized argument with Classics scholar Mary Lefkowitz, a prominent critic of historical claims made by Afrocentric scholarship. Martin subsequently took Lefkowitz to court for libel, but the case was dismissed. In 1993 he self-published The Jewish Onslaught, a book that Wellesley distanced themselves from and which generated further accusations of antisemitism. In 2002 he spoke at a conference organized by a leading Holocaust denial organization, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), alleging that Jewish organizations were trying to stifle free speech.[2][third-party source needed] Martin retired from Wellesley in 2007.

  1. ^ "Professor Tony Martin Dies at 70". Trinidad and Tobago News. 17 January 2013. Retrieved 5 February 2021.
  2. ^ Martin, Prof. Tony. "Tactics of Organized Jewry in Suppressing Free Speech". www.ihr.org. Institute for Historical Review. Retrieved 5 February 2021. Martin's title for his speech was 'Jewish Tactics as Exemplified in the Controversy Over Jewish Involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade'.