Khalil Gibran Muhammad,[1] PhD, a native of Chicago’s South Side, is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. Muhammad is a former professor of African-American history at Indiana University.[2]
Crain's New York Business[3] chose Muhammad as one of its 40 under Forty class of 2011 honorees.
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Muhammad is the great-grandson of of Elijah Muhammad.[4] His father is the noted Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times photographer Ozier Muhammad.[5] He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Economics in 1993. After working at Deloitte & Touche LLP, Muhammad received his Ph.D. in American History from Rutgers University in 2004, specializing in 20th-century U.S. and African-American history. He spent two years as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit criminal justice reform agency in New York City, before joining the faculty of Indiana University.
Muhammad is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.[6] The Condemnation of Blackness won the American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Publication Prize.[7] The annual prize is awarded to the best published book in American studies.[8]
As an academic, Muhammad is at the forefront of scholarship on the enduring link between race and crime that has shaped and limited opportunities for African Americans. Muhammad is now working on his second book, Disappearing Acts: The End of White Criminality in the Age of Jim Crow,[9] which traces the historical roots of the changing demographics of crime and punishment so evident today.
He has been an Associate Editor of The Journal of American History,[10] and was recently appointed to the Editorial Board of Transition Magazine, published by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.