Munday speaker focuses on intersections of race, inequality, criminal justice

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, will deliver this year’s Reuben A. and Cheryl Casselberry Munday Distinguished Lecture.

His talk, “A Revitalized Black Public Sphere and the Future of American Democracy,” will take place at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 19 at the Africana Studies and Research Center.

“Professor Khalil Muhammad is an acclaimed U.S. historian and one of our foremost public intellectuals engaged in vital conversations about race, criminal justice and mass incarceration,” said Kevin Gaines, the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Africana Studies and History and department chair for Africana studies.

Muhammad is the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library. The center is the world’s leading library and archive of global black history.

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 prior Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice.

In 2014, Reuben A. Munday ’69, MPS ’74, and Cheryl Casselberry Munday ’72 created an endowment to support a distinguished annual lectureship at the Africana Studies and Research Center. The lectureship brings a leading scholar of African and African-American studies to the Ithaca campus annually.