Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad knows the importance of Black history, perhaps better than most. The Chicago native, who earned a doctorate in history from Rutgers University and has become a rising star within academic circles for his groundbreaking research on race and crime, hails from a distinguished family of history makers.
His great-grandfather, Elijah Muhammad, was the leader of the Nation of Islam from 1934 to 1975. His father, Ozier Muhammad, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for The New York Times.
Now, at the age of 39, the assistant professor of history at Indiana University is poised to take the helm of the world’s leading repository of the global Black experience when he becomes director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in July.
Founded in 1926, the same year that Dr. Carter G. Woodson developed Negro History Week, the Schomburg Research Center — named after Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a celebrated intellectual during the Harlem Renaissance — has become the destination spot for thousands of scholars interested in researching and writing about the Black experience.
“I lived in the Schomburg when I was writing When Harlem was in Vogue,” says New York University history professor Dr. David Levering Lewis. “In speaking of the importance of the Schomburg, you can use any superlative that comes along.”
Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, directed Muhammad’s dissertation while on the faculty at Rutgers. He says he is pleased his mentee will be the Schomburg’s new director, adding that Muhammad will serve as the “public voice of African-American historiography.” “He is an extraordinary person,” says Lewis.
The Schomburg, a research unit of the New York Public Library, has experienced major financial cuts and declining revenues over the past decade. Lewis notes that running the institution will be “a very different trajectory than a tenured position at a research university.” Still, Muhammad says he’s up to the challenge.
