The second lecture of the Presidential Distinguished Speaker Series of Morgan State University (MSU) will welcome Khalil Muhammad.

Muhammad, a professor of history, race and public policy, at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, has contributed to black history and is an advocate of black culture and community.

During the event, Muhammad will talk and highlight the facets of the state of black America and politics, where questions and answers will be offered to anyone who attend.

“I will be talking to the students about lessons that we had learned about [through] African politics since we ended the civil right movements through the Obama presidency,” said Muhammad.

“I think that there are some things we should take from that 50-year periods and build upon so as to ensure that the next wave of activism, that black lives matter itself is leading now, will not repeat some of lenient and flaws of that earlier period.”

Muhammad, before Harvard, was the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library, which is also the world’s leading library and archive of global black history.

There, he learned in “a rich and vibrant black community” the efforts of the Schomburg Center in maintaining the long tradition of the principle of equality, which pushed him to teach at Harvard.

He teaches courses like Plutocracy, Philanthropy, and the Public Good and Race, Inequality, and American Democracy, which both explored and explained the relationship of race within the economy and the nation’s past inequality history that stills exist.

“I don’t think Harvard recognizes that importance of the principles of equality, so being able to teach our future leaders here that story of African American democratic struggle for freedom, is a story too few students in places such as Harvard ever learned,” Muhammad said.

As a contributor to a 2014 National Research Council study, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, he also wrote the book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.

His book won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book award in American Studies.

Muhammad’s work has been well recognized and much of it has appeared in national print and broadcast media like The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, Moyers and Company, MSNBC and C-Span.

For the event, he hopes that students will not think about their individual success as the marker of a good education, but will think about their success as the beginning of being able to create new communities that are not predicated on the violence of poverty, the violence of exclusion and the politics of personal responsibility, which he believes has been the most dominant themes in African American politics over the last generation.

The speaker series will take place in the Morgan Business Center on March 29, 2018 at 6:30 pm.