Black Classic Press, a Baltimore-based publishing company founded in 1978, has long been dedicated to unearthing “obscure and significant works by and about people of African descent,” its website states.

In recent weeks, the company has been a focus of renewed attention as its founder, Paul Coates, 78, prepares to accept a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in November.

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, 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.

Called The Jewish Onslaught, the book was self-published in 1993 by Tony Martin, a former professor of Africana studies at Wellesley College who had faced backlash for approvingly teaching an infamous tract from the Nation of Islam purporting to show that Jews played a disproportionate role in the slave trade — a claim historians have dismissed as factually inaccurate.

Black Classic Press makes no mention of Martin’s commitment to propagating an antisemitic trope in a laudatory blurb on its website, saying he “became embroiled in controversy over his classroom use of a book detailing the well-documented Jewish role in the Atlantic slave trade.”

The company did not respond to a request for comment from Jewish Insider on Thursday about its decision to republish Martin’s book — which was condemned at the time of its publication and has also been a source of controversy in recent years. 

Kristen Clarke, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has faced scrutiny for inviting Martin to speak when she was a student at Harvard University in 1994. The assistant attorney general apologized during her confirmation hearing in 2021, saying that it has been “a mistake” to give Martin “a platform.”

For its part, Martin’s book arose in response to the uproar over his promotion of the Nation of Islam study, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. called “the bible of the new antisemitism” and “one of the most sophisticated instances of hate literature yet compiled.”

But in The Jewish Onslaught, Martin, who died in 2013, aggressively defended his decision as well as the Nation of Islam’s shoddy history, while alleging a Jewish conspiracy to silence him. Among other insinuations, he also claimed that Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement had been a self-interested ploy to gain acceptance from the white liberal establishment — an example of what he called a “Jewish onslaught against Black progress.”

The book was denounced as antisemitic by the Anti-Defamation League — and in a rare public rebuke of a tenured professor, the president of Wellesley, Diana Chapman Walsh, condemned Martin’s use of “innuendo and the application of racial and religious stereotype.”

Nearly a decade later, in 2002, Martin spoke at a conference organized by a leading Holocaust denial group, the Institute for Historical Review, where he sought to expose what he called “Jewish tactics” to suppress free speech, drawing on his experiences at Wellesley.

Martin’s book is among several titles by the author that Black Classic Press is now republishing, mostly including his scholarly works on Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born Black nationalist leader.

“Tony was an unbending scholar who fought hard to correct misperceptions about Marcus Garvey and Pan-African history,” Coates said in 2020. “He fought just as hard for the rights of Black people to interpret and publish our history, unflinchingly, from our perspective.”

In addition to Martin, Coates — the father of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a renowned journalist set to release a controversial book largely focused on Israel on Tuesday — has published writings by at least one other author, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, to have faced accusations of historical revisionism with regard to Jews. 

But The Jewish Onslaught seems to stand out as a uniquely hateful addition to the Black Classic Press catalog — even if it is not packaged as such.

A lone review of the book listed on the company’s website invokes the same antisemitic tropes that Martin was criticized for espousing just over three decades ago.

“The tyrannical Jewish Lobby tried to demonize and bully Tony Martin and made a big mistake,” writes an anonymous commenter. “Martin’s short epic is hilarious and revealing of the ham-handed scurrilous lies which characterize this crowd spewing goyim-hatred while posing as victims and hiding behind the false narrative of the Hoax.”