Even in a busy season of elections and wars, one might have thought that the announcement that a National Book Award will be given to a purveyor of antisemitic and homophobic tracts would have caused a bit more of a stir. It seems like the kind of story that would be picked up by major newspapers, major magazines, and public radio.
It is remarkable, then, that there has not been greater attention to the work of W. Paul Coates, who will receive the award on November 20: tonight. As the publisher of The Jewish Onslaught, as well as assorted other books, Coates has promoted writing that is, in the parlance of our time, problematic, advancing pseudoscience while demeaning Jews and gays, among others.
Here’s the story. On September 4, the National Book Foundation, which gives out the National Book Awards, announced that the Literarian Award for outstanding service to the literary community, one of its two lifetime achievement awards, would be given to Coates, founder of Black Classic Press.
“W. Paul Coates has recovered and discovered countless essential works of Black literature, and readers everywhere have reaped the benefits of his passion and care for the written word,” said David Steinberger, chair of the National Book Foundation’s board, in a press release. Ruth Dickey, the foundation’s executive director, added, “As a librarian, publisher, and community activist, W. Paul Coates has been instrumental in preserving the legacy of remarkable writers and elevating works that have shaped our personal and collective understanding of the Black experience within the borders of the United States and around the globe.”
At first glance, Coates was a surprising choice, because from 1997 to 2005 he himself was a member of the National Book Foundation’s Board of Directors. During their deliberations, the members of the program committee, the subset of the board that selects finalists for the lifetime achievement awards, were aware of the conflict. “We had to launder the issue of selecting someone formerly at the table, a board member,” Quang Bao, a member of the program committee, told me. In the end, the committee decided that Coates’s contributions to publishing were so great that he merited selection, notwithstanding their personal connections to him and their affection for him. “One reason I was pressing to get him across the line this year was I miss him,” Bao said.
Coates was born in 1946 and raised in Philadelphia. Always bookish, while in the U.S. 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, Coates 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, [Coates would] explain to anyone who’d listen, they infected our minds,” Ta-Nehisi 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.”
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 better-known books, 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 September 27, Jewish Insider published 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, 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, which falsely accused the Jews of “a monumental culpability in slavery—and the black holocaust.” Henry Louis Gates Jr., in a 1992 New York Times article, called the book “one of the most sophisticated instances of hate literature yet compiled,” lamenting that “the bible of the new anti-Semitism” had become “a credo of a new philosophy of black self-affirmation.” Martin believed the uproar was fomented by a Jewish cabal including Hillel, B’nai B’rith, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish-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 October 11, two weeks after his Jewish Insider article, Kassel reported on X that Black Classic had removed The 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 catalog of books, which are in fact mostly Marcus Garvey-related, Coates thoughtlessly included Martin’s The Jewish Onslaught. Even the fulsome blurb, ignoring 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.
For example, Black Classic publishes The Osiris Papers: Reflections on the Life and Writings of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, edited by Raymond Winbush and Denise Wright, a collection of essays celebrating the late psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing, who around 1970 began advancing the theory that racism in white people is correlated to the lack of melanin in their skin—a theory whose absurdity, describing white people as descended from the “albino mutant offspring” of black people, did not keep it from spreading widely. For example, in The Beautiful Struggle, Ta-Nehisi writes, of his adolescent self, that he “flirted with the supremacy of melanin”—although he later realized that he had “embraced the charlatans and their stupid science.”
For good measure, Welsing also believed that homosexuality was imposed by white people on black men. Black homosexuality might be “reaching epidemic proportions amongst Black people in the U.S.,” she wrote in 1974, “although it was an almost nonexistent behavioral phenomenon amongst indigenous Blacks in Africa.” She ridicules black men wearing “earrings and bracelets. . . midriff tops. . . cinch waisted pants.” A year after the American Psychiatric Association had taken homosexuality off its list of mental disorders, Welsing criticized the decision, which “has nothing to do with the mental health of Black people.”
In the only essay in The Osiris Papers to deal with Welsing’s views on homosexuality, psychologist Denise Wright writes that she will not take sides: “[I]t is not this writer’s intention. . . to take an antagonist or protagonist position about homosexuality.” The essay is supportive of Welsing, without in any way challenging her view that, as Wright summarizes it, oppression has “caused the Black man to modify the expression of his sexuality/masculinity in more passive ways, which may present as effeminization, and/or engaging in bisexual and homosexual acts.” The Black Classic web page promoting this book calls Welsing “one of the greatest African thinkers of the past 100 years”; one can also find Coates expounding Welsing’s greatness in a video on the press’s website.
Black Classic also offers numerous books by the late Hunter College historian John Henrik Clarke (1915-1998), who shared Welsing’s homophobia. Clarke’s detractors often mention his antisemitism, but his homophobia is sometimes overlooked. On YouTube, you can see him cheered on as he tells an audience that Africans “had a healthy attitude toward things other people made unhealthy and made filthy and dirty.” Scornfully, he denies the possibility of gay Africans in antiquity. “Show me one case of sexual deviation before the coming of foreigners!” Elsewhere, Clarke, who blamed the “Jewish educational mafia” for multiculturalism, wrote an introduction to an edition of Michael Bradley’s 1978 book The Iceman Inheritance, which argues that white people are genetically predisposed to higher levels of racism and aggression than other groups, and speculates that Jews might be the ultimate “Neanderthal-Caucasoids.”
He also wrote the foreword to Bradley’s 1992 work Chosen People from the Caucasus: Jewish Origins, Delusions, Deceptions and Historical Role in the Slave Trade, Genocide and Cultural Colonization. This last work argues that the people known as Jews today are descended from eighth-century converts to Judaism, having usurped the tradition from a group that had been practicing Judaism for more than two millennia; these late-arriving Jews, including today’s Ashkenazi Jews, have uniquely high levels of Neanderthal aggression, which has helped them dominate other groups.
In 2001, Clarke told an interviewer that “the European uses this religion”—Judaism—“as the handmaiden of his imperial desires. I strictly mean the Europeans who answer to the word Jew. He reads the word Jew into ancient history, where the word didn’t exist. When the European Jew didn’t exist.” In an interview you can find online, Clarke told an audience, “If Jews want to dominate something, it’s very easy to dominate us. So that’s what they do.”
The idea that “white” Jews, whether Ashkenazi, Sephardi (Iberian), or Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African), are somehow impostors or usurpers—with the “real” Jews coming from the Nile River Valley or other parts of Africa—is a poisonous myth deployed to subvert the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. It’s a lie presented as a given within a certain strain of Afrocentric thought, and embraced not only by Clarke but by the aforementioned “Dr. Ben”—Yosef A.A. ben-Jochannan—who, like Clarke, is well-represented in the offerings of Black Classic Press, which publishes 12 ben-Jochannan titles. These include We the Black Jews: Witness to the “White Jewish Race” Myth and African Origins of the Major “Western Religions.”
In 2015, shortly after ben-Jochannan’s death at 96, The New York Times reported that for decades he had deceived employers about his credentials, telling Cornell and other institutions that he had degrees from Cambridge, in England, and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. Neither school had a record of his enrollment. “ ‘People condemn me for not being an intellectual of the Ph.D. type,’ Mr. Ben-Jochannan once said, reacting to questions later raised about his résumé,” the Times wrote. “While he used the ‘white man’s credential’ to go ‘certain places,’ Mr. Ben-Jochannan said, he refused to ‘let the white man certify’ his work.”
As far as I can tell, Coates has nowhere discussed the allegations against ben-Jochannan, his longtime intellectual partner—and a writer who remains a source of revenue for the press. To the contrary, Coates has always spoken of ben-Jochannan with reverence. “In 1978, when we started publishing, three elders were inspirations and gave their support—John G. Jackson, John Henrik Clarke, and Yosef ben-Jochannan,” writes Coates on the Black Classic website. “His books have revolutionized the way Black people relate to Africa and the Nile Valley.” After ben-Jochannan’s death, Coates told the Times, “I consider Dr. Ben the greatest of the self-trained historians.” Ta-Nehisi told the Times that ben-Jochannan’s example “runs through everything I do.”
Along with Clarke and ben-Jochannan, one of the authors best represented in Black Classic’s offerings remains Tony Martin. The Jewish Onslaught may be gone from the website, but several of his other books are still there, including a pamphlet, published in 1998, containing the text of a lecture given in Trinidad called The Progress of the African Race Since Emancipation and Prospects for the Future. Although largely about the Afro-Caribbean experience, Martin takes time to explain that “[p]seudo-scientific racism had been around since at least the 4th or 5th century AD when the Jewish holy book, the Talmud, pioneered the notion that Africans were recipients of the curse of Ham.” The Talmud makes no connection between Noah’s son Ham and Africa—that is a later, mainly Christian tradition, seen in early church theologians like Eusebius of Caesarea (CE 260-340) and Bede (CE 673-735).
But Martin, though a professor at Wellesley for many years, isn’t making a scholarly argument. He is making an indictment. This is also what he is doing when he writes:
“When President Clinton becomes president, he goes to Geneva and he bows down before the World Jewish Congress. When the African American woman Myrlie Evers-Williams became head of the NAACP the other day, she went straight to Geneva and bowed down before the World Jewish Congress.” This is fiction, of course—neither of them went to Geneva to genuflect before Jews—but hardly surprising coming from Martin, who elsewhere in his pamphlet calls the World Jewish Congress “a body organized on a racial or religious or whatever-the-Jews-are basis.”
One has to ask: Why is Coates selling this?
There are plenty of reasons to keep books in print, but a responsible publisher puts the work in context, whether through critical introductions in the books themselves, collateral educational material, or thoughtful blurbs in the catalogue or on the website. There are numerous ways to position offensive, problematic, but historically significant works as subjects of discussion. But Coates’s marketing of racist, antisemitic, and homophobic books and authors is enthusiastic and uncritical.
Before he settled into publishing, Coates’s grand ambition, as described in his son’s memoir, was a “new revolution” comprising “three parts—a bookstore, a printer, and a publisher—that would give the people control of information.” It would be, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “a propaganda machine.” If your mission is Afrocentric propaganda, you might overlook the antisemitism of the authors you publish because you think they will lift black people up, and you’re not too worried if, at the same time, they push Jews down.
In his essay for the Times, “Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. connects this double movement to something Louis Farrakhan said about his purpose in promoting The Secret Relationship. His goal was to “rearrange a relationship” that “has been detrimental to us.” Contemplating that strange term “rearrange,” Gates explains that Farrakhan meant “to convert a relation of friendship, alliance, and uplift into one of enmity, distrust, and hatred.”
In order to understand why Farrakhan wished to do this, Gates writes that it is necessary “to see anti-Semitism as a weapon in the raging battle of who will speak for black America—those who have sought common cause with others or those who preach a barricaded withdrawal into racial authenticity.” The “apostles of hate” who reject the model of common cause “know that the more isolated black America becomes, the greater their power. And what’s the most efficient way to begin to sever black America from its allies? Bash the Jews, these demagogues apparently calculate, and you’re halfway there.”
As to why the National Book Foundation is choosing to honor Coates, that is a more interesting question.
It is pure condescension not to interrogate the quality of the books Coates has published, or the reliability of the authors. Even if their quality did not disqualify Coates from a National Book Award, one would expect that the antisemitism or the homophobia would.
But what if nobody on the National Book Foundation’s program committee, or on the whole board of directors, read the books? It is difficult to know. Quang Bao said that the other members of the committee in 2024 were Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove Atlantic; Lisa Lucas, until recently head of Random House’s Pantheon and Schocken divisions; Calvin Sims, an executive at CNN; and the novelist and screenwriter Charles Yu. I tried to reach all four of them, by email, telephone, or both. None got back to me. Nor did board chair David Steinberger, board vice chair Fiona McCrae, board treasurer Elpidio Villarreal, or board member Kenneth L. Wallach. Ruth Dickey, the foundation’s executive director, did not return multiple calls and emails. Here is what Bao told me about the selection process:
Paul has been up for it every year. We have a long list, a short list—it’s a matter of, “Why this person now?” I can answer that best by saying we are in a heightened consciousness about African American literature, the African American experience. . . . He is a publisher, but not in New York City. He is a black publisher focused on historical black works, not a white editor. And he was a librarian for so long in his life, which meant to me his contemporary effort has a historical, diasporic reach. That is the deeper activism going on here.
When asked if he had read any of Coates’s books, Bao said that he had been assigned, in a graduate class he is taking, an excerpt by Walter Mosley. But he was unfamiliar with the bread and butter of what Black Classic Press publishes.
After the program committee chooses “two or three” finalists for each award, Bao said, it forwards its recommendations, along with biographies of the candidates, to the whole board of directors. That means the final decision to give Coates the award would have rested with all the board members, including Anthony W. Marx, president of the New York Public Library, and Julia A. Reidhead, president of the publisher W.W. Norton, neither of whom would speak with me.
That Coates is getting his award in part, as Bao sees it, to honor his “deeper activism,” his “diasporic reach,” and his status as a black editor from the provinces, i.e., not New York City—none of this is surprising, or even alarming. And if it helped Coates that he has a famous son, that too would be par for the course. The book industry has long been filled with nepotism, virtue signaling, and sloppy reading by people paid to read. What is disturbing, in this case, is not the selective virtue signaling but its consequences. To atone for past sins against black people, the industry is not merely overlooking offenses against Jewish and queer people but rewarding them.
The problem is not Coates, not really. He is a recognizable American type, or rather congeries of types: collector, ideological obsessive, pamphleteer, archivist, evangelist, hawker of wares. Some of those wares, those books and pamphlets, will be interesting, even valuable, and some will say crazy things, which, most of the time, can be safely ignored.
But at a time when truth is under attack as seldom before in American history, it won’t do to be casual or glib about it. We can’t lie to ourselves, or pretend that history is only a power game. None of us need care about who gets literary awards, but we should care about calling out bigotry, deception, and bad scholarship. If Coates has a defense of his authors’ views of Jews and gay men, he should come out with it. If he thinks “melanists” are onto something, he should say so. If he believes that peddling Tony Martin’s antisemitic lies is a responsible thing to do, he should say why. And if the directors of the National Book Foundation believe that these are unreasonable questions, that there’s nothing to see here, they should explain their thinking.
But first, they should do the reading.
Mark Oppenheimer is a professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, at Washington University in St. Louis. He is also the editor of Arc, an online journal of religion, politics, and more, in which a version of this piece first appeared.
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