Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Martin moved to the United Kingdom, where he studied law at Gray's Inn, London, and then economics at the University of Hull.

During the 1990s, he came under public criticism for encouraging his students to read The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a book compiled by the Nation of Islam that was widely regarded as antisemitic.

That decade, he also entered into a publicized argument with Classics scholar Mary Lefkowitz, a prominent critic of historical claims made by Afrocentric scholarship.

Born Anthony Martin in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, he attended Tranquillity School, where he was a contemporary of Stokely Carmichael.

[4] Martin was founder and chair of the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, where he began teaching in 1973, became tenured in 1975, and became a full professor in 1979.

In October 1991, a Wellesley student, Michelle Plantec, while on hall duty, claimed that she saw Martin wandering in a female dorm in a restricted area, in violation of a rule requiring male guests to be escorted.

When she asked him about his escort, Martin, she claims, responded using profanity, accused her of racism and bigotry, and positioned himself so as to physically intimidate her.

Martin denied all these claims, and declared that a group of women "accosted him rudely, despite circumstances that in his view made the legitimacy of his presence obvious.

and at that point he exploded and called me a fucking bitch, a racist, and a bigot, among other things...after all this, he went back into his meeting and said the only reason I had stopped him was because he was black.

[22][23][24] As this controversy progressed, Lefkowitz discovered that students in Martin's class were assigned a book called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,[25] compiled by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam.

In Martin's view, In January 1993, I was minding my own business and teaching my Wellesley College survey course on African American History when a funny thing happened.

Unknown to me, three student officers of the Jewish Hillel organization (campus B'nai B'rith stablemates of the Anti-Defamation League), sat in on my class and remained for a single period only.

As one of them explained in a campus meeting later, Jewish students had noticed The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews among my offerings in the school bookstore.

The book documents the considerable Jewish involvement in the Transatlantic African Slave Trade, the dissemination of which knowledge they, as Jews, considered an "anti-Semitic" and most "hateful" act.

[30][31] As the campus controversy wound down, Martin published a book telling his side of the story: The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront (1993).

A Massachusetts Superior Court Judge found that a lawsuit by Martin against Wellesley had in fact occurred, but "well after his tenure, and thus could not have caused it."

The judge agreed that Roy's conclusion, that fear of litigation would cause Wellesley to exercise "particular restraint" when dealing with Martin, "follows at least as strongly from the actual facts as it would from the erroneous version.

They gave him an unprecedented full-page op-ed in The New York Times to attack the Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.

[independent source needed] The IHR is the world's leading Holocaust denial organization, publishing articles and holding conferences denying the extermination of European Jewry by the Third Reich.