On Jan. 30, the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy will host Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad as the inaugural presenter in the William C. Powers, Jr. Speaker Series. Dr. Muhammad, one of the nation’s leading scholars on race, democracy, inequality, and criminal justice, will speak on "The Descent of Democracy and the Promise of African American History."
Dr. Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Muhammad was an associate professor at Indiana University.
Muhammad’s scholarship and teaching examines the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality and criminal justice in modern U.S. history. He is a contributor to a 2014 National Research Council study, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, and is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard), which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book award in American Studies.
Much of his work has been featured in a number of national print and broadcast media outlets, including the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, National Public Radio, Moyers and Company, MSNBC and C-SPAN. He has appeared in a number of feature-length documentaries, including Slavery by Another Name (2012) and the Oscar-nominated 13th (2016). Muhammad was an associate editor of The Journal of American History and was formerly the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice. He holds two honorary doctorates and is on the boards of the Vera Institute of Justice, The Museum of Modern Art, The Barnes Foundation, The Nation magazine and the advisory boards of Cure Violence and The HistoryMakers.
A native of Chicago’s South Side, Muhammad graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in economics in 1993, and then joined Deloitte & Touche, LLP, as a staff accountant until entering graduate school. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. history from Rutgers University.