Yesterday, the magazine I edit, Arc, published my long, reported essay about Paul Coates. The founder of Black Classic Press, Coates is receiving a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation. Yet Black Classic Press publishes books and authors deeply implicated in antisemitic and homophobic thought, as well as crank theories (like the one that blames white people’s lack of melanin for their historically aggressive ways). Here is an excerpt:
William Paul Coates was born in 1946 and raised in Philadelphia. Always bookish, while in the Army he encountered Richard Wright’s Black Boy,a transformative experience for him. Later, while working at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, he conceived Black Classic Press. As his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates, recalls, in his memoir The Beautiful Struggle, “at night,” after coming home from Howard, Paul would “untuck his shirt and descend into the cellar” to be with his collection of “out-of-print texts, obscure lectures, and self-published monographs by writers like J.A. Rogers, Dr. Ben, and Drusilla Dunjee Houston, great seers who returned Egypt to Africa and recorded our history, when all the world said we had none. These were words that they did not want us to see…. But Dad brought them back.”
These texts, many by self-taught scholars, formed the core of what would later be called Afrocentric historiography. Coates believed that the knowledge these writers imparted had been deliberately withheld from Black people. “From the day we touched these stolen shores, [Paul would] explain to anyone who’d listen, they infected our minds,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes. White people “forged a false Knowledge to keep us down. But against this demonology, there were those who battled back. Universities scorned them. Compromised professors scoffed at their names. So they published themselves and hawked their Knowledge at street fairs, churches, and bazaars. For their efforts, they were forgotten.”
Paul Coates resolved to bring their works back into print, and in 1978 he founded Black Classic Books, “a publishing operation he built from saddle-stitch staplers, a table-top press, and a Commodore 64,” his son would write. Since that time, his company has published books by writers known mainly in Afrocentric circles, as well as books better known, including an edition of David Walker’s Appeal and works by respected figures like W.E.B. Du Bois and the historian Carter G. Woodson. More recently, Black Classic has published books by the best-selling Walter Mosley, giving the press a financial boost.
But on Sep. 27, Jewish Insiderpublished an article by reporter Matthew Kassel, with the headline “Paul Coates, father of journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, republishing antisemitic screed ‘The Jewish Onslaught.’” “But even as Coates has been celebrated for nurturing such contemporary authors as Walter Mosley and reissuing works by W.E.B. Du Bois, among other luminaries,” Kassel wrote, “his company has also recently chosen to spotlight an antisemitic screed that seeks to uphold a widely discredited conspiracy theory alleging Jewish domination of the Atlantic slave trade.”
Apparently, into Black Classic’s online store, Paul Coates had added The Jewish Onslaught, by the late Wellesley professor Tony Martin (1942-2013). Martin was notorious in the early 1990s for assigning to his students the Nation of Islam text The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a widely discredited book that over-stated Jews’ involvement in the slave trade, and made numerous historical errors besides. Martin believed the uproar was fomented by a Jewish cabal including Hillel, B’nai Brith, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jew-controlled media, and their Gentile handmaidens. His response to the criticism of his first book was The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront, which he published in 1993. Martin’s book reiterates and defends the thesis about Jews and slavery, and it connects the dots of a Jewish campaign against him, driven by “the Jewish ability to make a lot of ‘noise’ and fill the media with their lies,” to choose one antisemitic passage among hundreds. Elsewhere, there are passages like, “Jewish lies and distortions were supplemented, perhaps inevitably, by Jewish dirty tricks.”
According to Jewish Insider, Coates refused to answer questions about his inclusion of The Jewish Onslaught on Black Classic’s list (Coates also refused, through an employee at Black Classic, to talk to me). According to a press release on the website, Black Classic was republishing a number of books from Majority Press—the press Tony Martin founded—including works by and about Marcus Garvey. The Jewish Onslaught was one of the Majority Press books that Black Classic was now picking up (this seems to have been in 2022, based on the publication date listed on Amazon). On Black Classic’s page for The Jewish Onslaught, the publicity blurb touted an “essay on Black-Jewish relations, primarily in the United States, by a professor of African American History who became embroiled in controversy over his classroom use of a book detailing the well-documented Jewish role in the Atlantic slave trade.”
On Oct. 11, two weeks after his Jewish Insider article, Kassel reported on X that Black Classic had removedThe Jewish Onslaught from its online store.
At this point in the story, one could imagine that this was all something of an accident—that, in acquiring Tony Martin’s back catalogue of books, which are in fact mostly Marcus Garvey–related, Coates thoughtlessly included Martin’s The Jewish Onslaught. Even the fulsome blurb, whitewashing the book’s antisemitism, could have been ported over from an old Majority Press website, perhaps by a clueless intern. At a small press, all hands on deck, mistakes get made.
Except that the closer one looks at Black Classic’s store, the more problematic texts one finds….
