Abraham Blumberg; Sociologist Provoked FBI Chief’s Retaliation

Abraham Samuel Blumberg, an educator and sociologist who made critical remarks about J. Edgar Hoover that caused the late FBI director to retaliate against him and students, has died. He was 75.

Blumberg, who had most recently taught at UC San Diego, died Nov. 11 in a San Diego health care center after a series of strokes.

In 1970, Blumberg led a discussion about Hoover and the FBI in his social science class at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.

“I said something about the cult of personality and that Mr. Hoover had been in power too long,” Blumberg recalled afterward for The Times.

Hoover ordered 15 FBI agents to drop out of the college. A master’s degree candidate was forced to resign from the FBI because he also criticized Hoover in a letter to Blumberg requesting advice about a possible thesis.

Blumberg was well known for his book “Criminal Justice,” a study of due process in American courts written from a sociologist’s point of view.

A native of Brooklyn, he was educated at Brooklyn College, Columbia Law School and the New School of Social Research in Manhattan. In addition to John Jay College, he taught at Brooklyn College, Queens College, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the police college at Bramshill, England, the University of Missouri at Kansas City and UC San Diego.

He is survived by his wife, Mildred Labiner Blumberg; a son, Neil Blumberg; a daughter, Karen Blumberg; a sister and a brother.