Joy Keys chats with Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad

The New York Public Library (NYPL) announced that Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a scholar of African-American history from Indiana University, has been selected as the next Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, effective July 2011.

Dr. Muhammad, a native of Chicago’s South Side, has served as Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University for five years, where he completed a major interpretive book in African-American studies, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, published recently by Harvard University Press. A great-grandson of Elijah Muhammad, he has deep roots in Black history and in Harlem. His father is the noted Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times photographer Ozier Muhammad.

As an academic, 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.

Dr. Muhammad, currently nominated for tenure at Indiana University, is now working on a book-length history of the racial politics surrounding the creation and swift dissolution of Prohibition-era “tough-on-crime” laws, specifically New York’s four-strikes law of 1926. He is also an Associate Editor of The Journal of American History.