207. Professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries Celebrating Black History and the Modern Civil Rights Struggle

In this episode of The Legal Lens Show, host Angela Reddock-Wright talks with Professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a civil rights and history professor at The Ohio State University, author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, and host of the Teaching Hard History podcast, about how we remember and misremember Black freedom struggles—and what that means for the present. A Brooklyn native, Morehouse and Duke graduate, and younger brother of Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries, he describes how growing up in Crown Heights in the 1980s amid the dawn of mass incarceration, the crack and AIDS epidemics, and parents who insisted that any vocation be “in service to the people” led him to use history as a lens to understand a world school never fully explained. Jeffries pushes back against the idea that the Civil Rights Movement is frozen in the 1950s and 1960s, arguing that while movements are intense but time-bound, Black struggle for freedom has been continuous—from abolition and mid‑century fights against Jim Crow to prison-based activism in the 1980s and today’s battles over policing, democracy, and education.

Key Topics Covered: 

• Professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries’ journey from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, through Morehouse College and Duke University to becoming a civil rights historian at The Ohio State University.
• How growing up in an all-Black Caribbean and African American neighborhood during the 1980s crack, AIDS, and mass-incarceration crises shaped his desire to study history as a tool to understand the world he was seeing but not being taught about in school.
• A reframing of the “civil rights movement”: why no movement lasts 40 or 400 years, how Black struggle has been continuous since 1619, and how specific movements (abolition, mid‑century civil rights, Black Power) emerge as moments when protest coalesces around clear goals.
• Why it’s dangerous to treat Black protest as “past tense,” and how understanding ongoing struggle helps us see today’s fights over voting, criminal justice, and education as part of a much longer story.

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