Annual Davis Lecture to be Held at Williams College

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., October 16, 2013—Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, will deliver Williams College’s annual W. Allison Davis and John A. Davis ’33 Lecture. Inspired by Allison Davis and John Dollard’s 1940 study Children of Bondage, Muhammad’s talk is titled, “Children of Statistical Bondage: The Punitive Legacy of Racial Quantification in Modern America.” This event, free and open to the public, will take place on Thursday, Oct. 24, at 6:30 p.m. in Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall, Bernhard Music Center.

Muhammad’s academic work has focused on discovering the link between race and crime that has shaped and limited opportunities for African Americans. His first book, The Condemnation of Blackness, and the Making of Modern Urban America, an examination of the role of the social scientists in shaping racial “data” and its consequences on African-Americans, won the American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Publication Prize. Muhammad is currently working on his second book, Disappearing Acts: The End of White Criminality in the Age of Jim Crow,which traces the historical roots of the changing demographics of crime and punishment.

The Annual W. Allison Davis 1924 and John A. Davis 1933 Lecture commemorates the work of two distinguished scholars, brothers who, throughout their adult lives, made important contributions to equal rights and opportunity in the United States. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Davis Center.

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Published October 16, 2013