After 34 years on the Wellesley College faculty, Dr. Tony Martin’s teachings have at times been controversial, but his mentoring of Black women is what his students will remember most.

Wellesley, Mass.
Scan references to Dr. Tony Martin in newspaper databases, and you would think the Africana studies professor has devoted his long academic career at Wellesley College solely to the Jewish role in the African slave trade.

You would get only a clue or two that Martin, a historian who retires this spring after 34 years at the small all-female school outside Boston, is a prolific scholar of Marcus Garvey. You would have no idea that Garvey was the subject not only of Martin’s doctoral dissertation at Michigan State University, but also nine of the dozen books he has written or edited.

What you find instead are articles since the early 1990s about a controversy over Martin assigning his students readings from a 1991 book published by the Nation of Islam, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews ,Vol. 1. There followed denunciations from national Jewish organizations, clashes between Martin and Wellesley classics professor Mary Lefkowitz, his charge that the college unfairly denied him a merit raise and two unsuccessful libel suits he filed, one against Lefkowitz, who is Jewish and retired in 2005.

But Martin mentions none of that when asked about his legacy.

“I’d like to be remembered for my Garvey work,” replies Martin, 65, who plans to move back to his native Trinidad after the  spring semester.

Academic databases do reflect his scholarship on Garvey. His latest book is a biography of Amy Ashwood Garvey, the Jamaican Pan-Africanist’s widow. Only one of his books, The Jewish Onslaught, self-published in 1993, concerns the slave trade controversy that raged in newspapers.

“I think that’s a reflection of the power of the Jewish lobby that arrayed itself against me,” Martin says. “They consider that an anti-Semitic statement when you say they are powerfully positioned in the media, but this kind of thing, I think, proves it.”