Hasan Kwame Jeffries

HASAN KWAME JEFFRIES was born in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated summa cum laude from Morehouse with a BA in history in 1994. While matriculating at Morehouse, he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society and initiated into the Pi Chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc.

After graduating from Morehouse, he enrolled at Duke University, where he earned a MA in American history in 1997 and a PhD in African American history in 2002.

In 2003, Hasan joined the faculty at The Ohio State University in the history department and at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. He was recently promoted to associate professor with tenure.

In 2009, Hasan published his first book, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (NYU Press). Bloody Lowndes tells the remarkable story of the ordinary people and college organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who ushered in the Black Power era by transforming rural Lowndes County, Alabama from a citadel of violent white supremacy into the center of southern militancy. They achieved this extraordinary feat by creating the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an all-black political party that was also the original Black Panther Party. Bloody Lowndes has been praised as “an invaluable contribution to understanding current and future ‘conversations’ on race and politics.”

Hasan resides in Columbus, Ohio with his wife Rashida and daughters Asha and Aliyana. They travel frequently to the South to visit friends, and return often to Brooklyn to visit family.