Renowned Lecturer Announced as NAACP Centennial Speaker

Chicago-based author and researcher Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is coming to South Orange Aug. 21 as part of the Oranges and Maplewood Unit NAACP's 100th anniversary commemoration. The renowned scholar will be in the area to present the lecture, "Why the Past Won’t Go Away."

Since 2010, Muhammad has been director of the historic Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. His book, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,” was 
published by Harvard University Press and won the 2011 John Hope Franklin
Best Book award in American Studies.  


As an academic, Dr. Muhammad is at the forefront of scholarship on the enduring link between race and crime that is shaping and limiting opportunities for African-Americans.  He currently is working on his second book, “Disappearing Acts: The End of White Criminality in the Age of Jim Crow”, which will trace the historical roots of the changing demographics in crime and punishment.


Dr. Muhammad’s work has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, The Guardian (UK) and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.   Khalil has been a guest on Bill Moyers and Company, CSPAN, National Public Radio and Pacifica.   He has been an associate editor of The Journal of American History and he currently serves on the National Research Council’s Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration; the board of The Barnes Foundation; and the editorial board of Transition Magazine, published by the W.E.B. Du 
Bois Institute at Harvard University.  

The lecture, which will be followed by a brief question-and-answer session, will be held at St. Andrews and Holy Communion Church, 160 W. South Orange Ave.  Admission is free.