Tony Martin (professor)

Tony Martin (21 February 1942 – 17 January 2013) was a Trinidad and Tobago-born scholar of Africana Studies.

After secondary school, Martin went to England to study law at Gray's Inn, London, where he was called to the Bar in 1966.

Martin subsequently received a B.Sc. honours degree in economics at the University of Hull (1968).

He taught briefly in Trinidad at Cipriani Labour College and St. Mary's College, before moving to the United States in 1969 to pursue graduate studies in African History at Michigan State University, earning an M.A. and completing his Ph.D. in 1973.

His doctoral dissertation, on Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, would be the basis for the book he later published as Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

During the latter part of the 1970s and 1980s he published several books on Garvey and Garveyism.

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.

Martin was founder and chair of the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, where he began teaching in 1973, became tenured in 1975, and became a full professor in 1979.

He also taught at the University of Michigan-Flint and was a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, Brandeis University, Brown University, and Colorado College, and also spent a year as an honorary research fellow at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad.

Martin was a prolific Garvey scholar – he was considered by some "the world's foremost authority on Marcus Garvey" – one of his earliest works being Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, published in 1976.

He co-authored, with Wendy Ball, Rare Afro-Americana: A Reconstruction of the Adger Library (1981).

In 1983, Martin founded The Majority Press, a publishing company that produced many of his own books, as well as work by other authors.

He wrote a number of other books about Garvey, including Marcus Garvey, Hero: A First Biography (1983), African Fundamentalism: A Literary and Cultural Anthology of Garvey's Harlem Renaissance (1991), Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts and the Harlem Renaissance (1983), The Poetical Works of Marcus Garvey (1983), and The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond (1984).

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 October 1991, a Wellesley student, Michelle Plantec, while on hall duty, claimed that she saw Martin wandering in a female dorm in a restricted area, in violation of a rule requiring male guests to be escorted.

When she asked him about his escort, Martin, she claims, responded using profanity, accused her of racism and bigotry, and positioned himself so as to physically intimidate her.

Martin denied all these claims, and declared that a group of women "accosted him rudely, despite circumstances that in his view made the legitimacy of his presence obvious."

In an interview with a campus newspaper, Plantec said: "I stopped him and said, 'Excuse me, sir, who are you with?' He looked at me and said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'What Wellesley student are you with?' and at that point he exploded and called me a fucking bitch, a racist, and a bigot, among other things...after all this, he went back into his meeting and said the only reason I had stopped him was because he was black."

Martin, in the same interview, agreed that there was an angry exchange, but denied that he used profanity.

He also said he asked permission from the dormitory desk before going to the restroom.

"Coming out of the restroom, I was rudely accosted by a group of women who were coming up the stairs behind me...I tried to ignore them for a short space of time...and eventually, when we got to the top of the stairs I became very annoyed, and expressed my annoyance to the people who were behind me."

Mary Lefkowitz was a classics professor at Wellesley, who taught courses on ancient Greek culture.

In 1993 he self-published The Jewish Onslaught, a book that Wellesley distanced themselves from and which generated further accusations of antisemitism.

In November 1994 he spoke at Harvard University at the invitation of the Black Students Association and praised its president Kristen Clarke for her courage in inviting him.

Martin was a prolific author of scholarly articles on many aspects of Black History and lectured all over the world.

He received awards and honors from the American Philosophical Society, the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and many others.

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.

Martin retired from Wellesley in 2007.

Born Anthony Martin in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, he attended Tranquillity School, where he was a contemporary of Stokely Carmichael.

Martin wrote, compiled or edited 14 published titles, including Caribbean History: From Pre-Colonial Origins to the Present (2012) and Amy Ashwood Garvey: Pan-Africanist, Feminist and Mrs. Marcus Garvey No. 1, Or, A Tale of Two Amies (2007).

He had been working on two further biographies of Trinidadian women, of Audrey Jeffers (who was his aunt) and Kathleen Davis (also known as “Aunty Kay”).

Martin died unexpectedly on 17 January 2013, aged 70, at Westshore Medical Hospital, Cocorite, Trinidad and Tobago.

His funeral service was held on 25 January.