LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Author, historian and educator Khalil Gibran Muhammad will talk about how knowing the past directly relates to how people understand current race-related crises Nov. 20 during the seventh annual Anne Braden Memorial Lecture at the University of Louisville.
His free, public talk – “Why the Past Won’t Go Away: The Crisis of History in the Age of Post-racialism” – will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Swain Student Activities Center’s Multipurpose Room.
UofL’s Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research sponsors the lecture; the lecture and institute are named for a Louisvillian active in the civil rights movement for nearly six decades.
Muhammad is expected to talk about how people remember historic events such as the March on Washington 50 years ago and how memories can be reliable or faulty. His lecture will touch on racism, incarceration, criminal justice and the 2012 fatal shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. He also will discuss waning investment nationally in history studies and its impact on young people’s perceptions.
Muhammad is director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a New York Public Library research library and archive dedicated to people of African descent. He formerly was an Indiana University associate professor of history.
His book, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America,” won the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin publication prize in 2011. He is writing a second book, “Disappearing Acts: The End of White Criminality in the Age of Jim Crow,” about the roots of the changing demographics of crime and punishment.
For more information, call Mariam Williams at the institute, 502-852-6142, or visit http://www.louisville.edu/braden