The Anti-Defamation League met March 14 with officials of the Queens Borough (N.Y.) Public Library over what ADL contends is the misshelving of the Holocaust-denial book The Zionists in the black heritage section of the Langston Hughes branch. The ADL is seeking the book’s reclassification under a more accurate heading.
Queens library officials placed the book in the African-American section because they mistakenly believed that the author, Texas oilman George Armstrong, is black. “That’s what our research indicated,” branch manager Andrew Jackson said in the March 15 New York Daily News, adding that the black heritage collection “is designed to provide what is written by and about people from the black community.” ADL spokesperson Howie Katz countered that an anti-Semitic book having no tie to black heritage “does a disservice” in such a collection.
African-American patron James Keller agreed, telling the newspaper, “I can see if they’re trying to compare it with slavery, but they’re not the same. It doesn’t belong in the same format.”
Posted March 19, 2001.