Leonard Jeffries Jr. (born 1937) is an American professor of black studies at the City College of New York, part of the City University of New York. He achieved national prominence in the early 1990s for his controversial statements about Jews and white people. In a 1991 speech he claimed that Jews financed the slave trade, used the movie industry to hurt black people, and that whites are "ice people" while Africans are "sun people". Jeffries was discharged from his position as chairman of the black studies department at CUNY, leading to a lengthy legal battle.

Jeffries attended Lafayette College for his undergraduate work. While in Lafayette, Jeffries pledged, and was accepted into, Pi Lambda Phi, "the Jewish fraternity," which was the only fraternity at Lafayette that would accept black students. In his senior year, Jeffries was elected president of the fraternity, and as a result, his room and board expenses were paid for by the fraternity. After graduating with honors in 1959, Jeffries won a Rotary International fellowship to the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and then returned in 1961 to study at Columbia University's School of International Affairs from which he received a master's degree in 1965. At the same time he worked for Operation Crossroads Africa allowing him to spend time in Guinea, Mali, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast, and became the program coordinator for West Africa in 1965. Jeffries became a political science instructor at CCNY in 1969 and received his doctorate in 1971 with a dissertation on politics in the Ivory Coast. He became the founding chairman of Black Studies at San Jose State College in California. A year later, he became a tenured professor at CCNY and became the chairman of the new African-American Studies Department. It was unusual for an inexperienced scholar to both receive tenure and a chair.