Hasan Kwame Jeffries

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 Original 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, and served as the lead scholar and primary scriptwriter for the $27 million renovation of the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, the site of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hasan regularly shares his expertise on African American history and contemporary Black politics through public lectures, op-eds, and interviews with print, radio, and television news outlets. He has also contributed to several documentary film projects as a featured on-camera scholar, including the Emmy nominated, four-hour, PBS documentary Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise.

Hasan’s commitment to teaching “Hard History” led him 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 production of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance 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.

An associate professor of history 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 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching, the university’s highest commendation for teaching.

Hasan graduated from Morehouse College with a BA in history. He earned a PhD in American history with a specialization in African American history from Duke University.