Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Courtesy of Indiana University

On Tuesday, March 18, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, will give a special presentation to Library Company members on the significance of African American archival repositories. A media commentator and former professor of African-American History at Indiana University, Dr. Muhammad is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, winner of the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Publication Prize in 2011.

Dr. Muhammad is at the forefront of scholarship on the enduring link between race and crime that has shaped and limited opportunities for African Americans. He is now working on his second book, Disappearing Acts: The End of White Criminality in the Age of Jim Crow, which traces the historical roots of the changing demographics of crime and punishment so evident today.

He spent two years as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow on Race, Crime, and Justice at the Vera Institute of Justice after earning his Ph.D. in American History from Rutgers University.