Khalil gibran muhammad biography

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a Visiting Professor of Public Policy (and former Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy) at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he directed the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project. He is Professor of African American Studies and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and 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, Khalil was an associate professor at Indiana University.

Khalil’s scholarship examines the broad intersections of racism, economic inequality, criminal justice and democracy in U.S. History. He is co-editor of “Constructing the Carceral State,” a special issue of the Journal of American History, and contributor to a National Research Council study, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (2014), as well as the award-winning author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. He is currently co-directing a National Academy of Sciences study on reducing racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.

His writing and scholarship have been featured in national print and broadcast media outlets, such as the New Yorker, Washington Post, The Nation, National Public Radio, PBS Newshour, Moyers and Company, MSNBC, and the New York Times, which includes his sugar essay for The 1619 Project. He has appeared in a number of feature-length documentaries, including the recently-released Amend: The Fight for America (2021), the Oscar-nominated 13th (2016) and Slavery by Another Name (2012). Khalil was an associate editor of The Journal of American History and an Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society.

In 2017,

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. This vital book has been called “a mandatory read” (David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author) and “a poignant reminder of how these inequalities were shaped and how deeply they reach back into the nation’s history” (Journal of African American Literature).

He is also the co-host, alongside his long-time friend Ben Austen, of the podcast Some of My Best Friends Are. Today a Princeton professor (Khalil) and an award-winning journalist (Ben), the two interracial best friends show us how we can have conversations about race and racism with levity—that we can stumble and still move forward.  Some of My Best Friends Are is a thoughtful and compassionate exploration of the issues that divide us, showing us that we can come together, however imperfectly, in the process of learning.

After graduating from college, Khalil worked as a public accountant at Deloitte & Touche LLP for three years, giving him a lens into how businesses work, why diversity is crucial to company success, and how to actually implement it. As nearly every organization in America pushes for diversity and inclusion, why are people of color still vastly under-represented in senior leadership? “It takes courage to redistribute power and it takes candidness to reflect on the fact that we do have a problem in our society,” Khalil says. With both a corporate and academic background, Khalil’s talks break down the three barriers that must be overcome for organizations to transform and harness the best ideas for success in the 21st century.

Khalil is the inaugural Professor of African American Studies and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and was previously Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cu

American academic (born 1972)

Khalil Gibran Muhammad (born April 27, 1972) is an American academic. He is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Radcliffe Institute. In 2025 he will leave his appointment at Harvard to become professor of African American studies and Public Affairs at Princeton. He is the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a Harlem-based branch of the New York Public Library system, a research facility dedicated to the history of the African diaspora. Prior to joining the Schomburg Center in 2010, Muhammad was an associate professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington.

Early life and education

Muhammad grew up in South Side, Chicago, a middle-class community that was predominantly segregated. He attended Kenwood Academy in Hyde Park. He is the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times photographer Ozier Muhammad and Dr. Kimberly Muhammad-Earl, a teacher and administrator at the Chicago Board of Education. His paternal great-grandfather is Elijah Muhammad, an African-Americanreligious leader, who led the Nation of Islam (NOI) from 1934 until his death in 1975 when Muhammad was 2+1⁄2 years old.

In 1993, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in economics. During college, Muhammad became a member of the Delta Eta chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.

In 2004, Muhammad received his Ph.D. in American history from Rutgers University, specializing in 20th century and African-American history. In 2013, Muhammad was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from The New School.

Career

After graduation from college, he worked as a public accountant at the financial advisory firm Deloitte & Touche LLP for three years. Initially planning a career in

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad bears a famous name and is the progeny of an equally famous religious leader. He was born into the counterculture of the 1960s, to parents inspired by the mysticism of Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran, and spent his early childhood on the South Side of Chicago within the community of the Nation of Islam, the religious and political group led by his great-grandfather, Elijah Muhammad.

On Wednesday night, beneath the bright lights of the main hall of the Smith Campus Center, Professor Muhammad reflected on these, and other, defining forces of his life, in the first installment of a new series of conversations hosted by Muslim Chaplain Khalil Abdur-Rashid. Titled “Life Matters,” the series presents an opportunity for Harvard students to learn from the experiences of esteemed members of the University community, through dialogue addressing the role that religion, spirituality, and ethics have played during their lives.

Throughout the evening, Muhammad shared insights from a life that in many ways he has “grown into,” beginning with his reflections on how it has always been a work in progress to understand the significance of sharing Gibran’s name. In seventh grade, an English teacher gave him a signed copy of the poet’s most renowned work, “The Prophet,” a gift that Muhammad says marked “the first time in my life I realized how important my namesake was, and I began to read and study and I realized that I could make something of this, in terms of his legacy, and my own.”

Bearing the name wasn’t always easy. As a child, he said, he often had to explain it to his public school classmates (the majority of Nation of Islam students attended religious schools, but he did not); his seventh-grade yearbook described him as Kahlua Muhammad. Later in life, he said he was denied financial aid for a Ph.D. program when a member of the search committee admitted concern that he was af