Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Ph.D., (he/him) is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and faculty director of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project (IARA). His scholarship examines the intersections of racism, economic inequality, criminal justice and democracy in U.S. history.
These 10 key concepts and main points encourage us to think critically about the complexities of history as we learn about and from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
How did racial hierarchy adapt and persist after Emancipation? Throughout its history, the United States has been structured by a racial caste system. From slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, these forms of racialized social control reinvented themselves to meet the needs of the dominant social class according to the constraints of each era.
Shelton is a first-grade teacher and author of Child of the Civil Rights Movement. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and three sons. She is dedicated to spreading the truth about our American history.
Hussein, the narrator of My Name Was Hussein, lives in Bulgaria. His Muslim family takes great pride in their religion and traditions. But soldiers soon arrive in their village and force all of the Muslims to adopt Christian names, thereby inhibiting their freedom and identities.