Warnock’s former church repeatedly hosted an anti-Semitic and black supremacist teacher

Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., worked as a youth and assistant church pastor for a decade while repeatedly hosting a former New York City teacher who was fired for anti-Semitic and black supremacist teachings.

From 1991 to 2001, Warnock served as youth pastor for six years and then associate pastor for four years under the Reverend Calvin O. Butts at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, several years before leading the same Atlanta church where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. he was a pastor

From 1991 to 1998, Butts Abyssinian Church hosted Leonard Jeffries as a speaker at least three times.

Leonard Jeffries is the uncle of Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who is poised to succeed Nancy Pelosi as the next House Democratic leader. The congressman said in 2013 that he remained close to his uncle but disagreed with his theories.

Georgia Democratic Senate candidate U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) speaks during a campaign rally on November 27, 2022 in Morrow, Georgia.
(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

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At the time of his first appearance at the Abyssinian Church in 1991, Leonard Jeffries was embroiled in a legal battle to retain his position as chair of the Black Studies Department at the City University of New York (CUNY) . He was eventually removed from office after a years-long dispute over racist and anti-Semitic comments, including blaming Jews for the transatlantic slave trade and supporting black supremacist ideals, such as the theory that higher levels of melanin they make blacks inherently superior to whites.

Leonard spoke about the CUNY controversy during an October 1991 speech at Abyssinia Baptist Church after a student reporter from The Harvard Crimson alleged that the professor had criticized the outlet as a “daily Jew” during his interview, threatened the journalist’s life and had a bodyguard physically dismiss him. the audio recording of the interview, The New York Times reported at the time.

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Leonard told the church congregation that he sat down with the student reporter with the intention of discussing multicultural education issues, not the anti-Semitism controversy, and did not deny the reporter’s allegations.

Although Warnock began working at Abyssinian in 1991 after graduating from Morehouse College earlier that year, it is unclear whether he was working at the church at the time of Leonard’s speech in October.

Former black studies professor Leonard Jeffries outside a New York federal court.
(Photo by mark peterson/Corbis via Getty Images)

Also in 1991, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) published a report on Leonard “and the anti-Semitic branch of the Afrocentrism movement,” highlighting several of the now-former professor’s comments about whites and Jews.

The AJC report said Leonard “preaches hatred of Jews as a religion” and claimed that in 1990 he organized a conference for black teachers that included black nationalist and anti-Semitic rhetoric and reading materials.

In July 1991, three months before his first Abyssinian speech, Leonard claimed that the representation of black people in movies was “a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood, where people were called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani and what not,” the AJC. the report said.

The report also noted Leonard’s racially charged rhetoric “teaching that blacks are racially superior to whites” and his references to blacks as “sunshine people” because of “more melanin in their skin than whites , whom he calls “ice people”.

Jeffries appeared again at the Abyssinian church in February 1992, giving a speech on systemic racism and black-on-black crime after a white police officer was acquitted in the shooting death of black teenager Phillip Pannell , Newsday reported at the time.

“Black people are bullied,” Jeffries said.

Abyssinian hosted Jeffries for the third time in July 1998, when he and his wife, Rosalind, held the libation that marked the death of black historian John Hendrik Clarke, The New York Beacon reported at the time.

In 2017, the left-wing group, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), dubbed Jeffries an “anti-Semitic” speaker in a report on anti-Semitism on college campuses.

“Leonard Jeffries, the former head of the Black Studies Department at CUNY City College, and a professor there since 1972, has advocated racist and anti-Semitic views and theories since at least the early 1980s, when his comments, facts while he was head of the department, began to attract public attention,” the ADL wrote.

“In the spring of 1988, a white student wrote an account in the student newspaper of his experiences in Jeffries’ class, Black Studies 101,” the ADL continued. “The student recounted numerous times when Jeffries built large parts of his class around anti-white arguments.”

The ADL also pointed to a 1990 New York Times article that “reported that in an April 1990 class on African heritage, Jeffries said that ‘the wealthy Jews who financed the development of Europe also they financed the slave trade” and that “the Jewish Holocaust is raised”. as the only Holocaust”.

Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan delivers a speech and speaks about U.S. President Donald Trump at the Watergate Hotel on November 16, 2017 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Leonard Jeffries’ rhetoric about Jews continued even after his appearance at Harvard. In 1994, The New York Times quoted him as comparing white Jews to “scumbags” who “stank up everything.” Before a keynote speech in Chicago in February 2012 by notorious anti-Semitic preacher Louis Farrakhan, Leonard was quoted as saying during a panel discussion: “The evil genius of the Jewish community was to gather their powers to make the business their religion and be part of it. their culture.”

Butts, who led the Abyssinian Church while Warnock worked there, defended Leonard and criticized CUNY in 1992 for removing the professor as president, saying “We don’t need an ivory tower academy. We need a scholarly activist like Dr. Jeffries.”

Reverend Calvin Butts of the Abyssinian Baptist Church speaks. Harlem Mothers Stop Another Violent End (SAVE) commemorates National Homicide Victims’ Day of Remembrance on September 25, 2020.
(Photo by Steve Sanchez/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Butts later came under fire in 1995 after his church hosted Cuban dictator Fidel Castro as a speaker and Butts appeared to praise him, prompting chants of “Fidel! Fidel! Fidel!” of the public

Butts defended the decision to invite Castro, arguing that it was “in our tradition to welcome those who are visionary, who are revolutionary and who seek the freedom of all people in the world.”

Butts also refused to condemn Farrakhan for calling Judaism a “gutter religion” in 1986, prompting members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to boycott the Abyssinian church.

Butts, who died in October this year aged 73, once described Warnock as “one of the brightest, most intelligent and academically prepared young clergymen in the country”.

After his death, Warnock described Butts as his mentor.

“Calvin Butts taught me so much,” Warnock said last month. “Calvin Butts taught me to take my ministry to the streets. The Lord’s work does not stop at the church door. That is where it begins. His pulpit was the public square.”

Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock speaks to members of the media after a campaign rally in Conyers, Georgia on November 21, 2022.
(Brandon Gillespie)

Warnock has come under fire for his own praise of Farrakhan, who has called Jews “evil”, “satanic” and compared them to “termites”.

During a 2013 speech, Warnock praised Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam as an “important” voice for black Americans.

“His voice has been important to the development of black theology,” Warnock said at the time, referring to an ideology developed by black preachers during the civil rights era to combat white supremacy within Christianity.

“It was the black Muslims who challenged the black preachers and said, ‘you are promulgating…the white man’s religion.’ This is a religion of slaves. You’re telling people to focus on heaven, meanwhile, they’re catching hell,” Warnock said.

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The reverend said the Nation of Islam was needed to “fire” black preachers and keep them “honest” about the message coming from their pulpits.

Warnock, who faces a runoff election against Republican Herschel Walker in Georgia on Dec. 6, did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

Fox News’ Houston Keene and Bradford Betz contributed to this report.