2024 New York Benefit

Hasan Kwame Jeffries teaches, researches, and writes about the African American experience from a historical perspective. 

He has chronicled the civil rights movement in the ten-episode Audible Originals series “Great Figures of the Civil Rights Movement,” and has told the remarkable story of the original Black Panther Party in Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, which has been praised as “the book historians of the black freedom movement have been waiting for.”

Hasan has collaborated on several public history projects, including serving as the lead scholar and primary scriptwriter for the $27 million renovation and redesign of the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, the site of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He currently serves as the chairperson of the Board of Directors of The Montpelier Foundation, which stewards the Virginia estate of James Madison, the fourth president of the United States and the architect of the Constitution.

Regularly sharing his expertise on African American history and contemporary Black politics, his scholarship can be found through public lectures, op-eds, and interviews with print, radio, and television news outlets, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, CNN, and MSNBC. 

He has also contributed to several documentary film projects as an historical advisor and featured on-camera scholar, including the 2023 documentaries Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World (PBS) and Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power (NBC/Peacock). His 2020 TEDx Talk “Why we must confront the painful parts of US history” has been viewed more than 2 million times.

For his public history work, the King Arts Center (Columbus, Ohio) honored him with a 2023 Legacy and Legends Award.

Hasan’s commitment to teaching what he calls “Hard History” led him to edit Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, a collection of essays by leading civil rights scholars and teachers that explores how to teach civil rights history accurately and effectively, and to host the podcast “Teaching Hard History,” a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice division. Hasan also helps school districts develop anti-racism programming and culturally responsive curricular content centered on social studies by conducting professional development workshops for teachers and administrators.

A College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Associate Professor in the Department of History at The Ohio State University, Hasan takes great pride in opening students’ minds to new ways of understanding the past and the present. For his pedagogical creativity and effectiveness, he has received numerous awards, including Ohio State’s highest commendation for teaching—the Ohio State Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Hasan graduated from Morehouse College in 1994 with a BA in history and earned his PhD in American history with a specialization in African American history from Duke University in 2002.