Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Ford Foundation Professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He directs the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project 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. Khalil’s scholarship examines the broad intersections of racism, economic inequality, criminal justice, and democracy in U.S. history. He is currently co-directing a National Academy of Sciences study on reducing racial inequalities in the criminal justice system. In 2017, Khalil received the Distinguished Service Medal from Columbia University’s Teachers College and holds two honorary doctorates. He is on the boards of the Vera Institute of Justice, The Museum of Modern Art, Cure Violence Global, Oliver Scholars, The New York Historical Society, and The Nation magazine, as well as the advisory boards of Common Justice, The HistoryMakers, and the Lapidus Center for the Study of Transatlantic Slavery. A native of Chicago’s South Side, Khalil graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in economics in 1993, and then joined Deloitte as a staff accountant until entering graduate school. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. history from Rutgers University. Gordon Parks photographed his great-grandfather Elijah Muhammad for a photo essay in Life magazine.

“If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.” Khalil Muhammad