is he responsible for the freshman spirit in the schomburg center. dr. is he the new director of the new york public library schomburg center for research in black culture. >> i want this center to be as aggressive and as well positioned as possible to be a resource to anyone who has questions about the kind of country we live in and the kind of country that we can live in. >> cal he'll mohammed is a respected scholar and author. is he also the great grandson of elijah mohammed, founder of the country of islam. >> given that i was want yet 3 years old when he passed, i have never tried to claim more connection to him than my biographical connection. >> as it turns out, mohammed took office during the same time the schomburg featured a special from its featured collection on malcolm x. >> my great grandfather malcolm x helped to create the space in this country necessary for the real change that took place in 1960s. >> keeping history like that alive for generations to come is only one of his goals. >> what's special and perhaps unique about kalil mohamme

so pretend i'm a freshman in your class at indiana university, which you left to come to schomburg. how do you plan to rescue me from my ignorance of the past? >> well, if i get to meet you, then i'm gonna encourage you to take a u.s. history course for starters. the problem is that our colleges and our sense of the public sphere are shrinking. colleges and universities are giving increasing weight to the stem fields. science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. they haven't cut out the humanities. i don't want to overstate or say that there's a crisis, necessarily. but there is a sense that university presidents, particularly in state university systems, have to be responsive to state legislatures. and if those state legislatures happen to be republican, there's a lot at stake when it comes to what is the appropriate history lesson to be taught to our children. and i want to point out that in texas, for example, a couple of years ago, there was a move by the then state regents to remove or to lessen -- the state's own history of civil rights activism, both statewide and natio

so many be thanks to schomburg archives for assisting me in my research along the way. [applause] >> indeed, i agree. i try to let my projects arrive organically, one from another. and so early on when i was studying martin luther king jr., there was bayard rustin. and then later when i was studying jackie robinson, there was bayard rustin, and then when i was studying thurgood marshall, the one who was the naacp attorney, there was bayard rustin. and it was pretty easy for me to target him because he was all over the place, and he was such a fascinating character. to me, he's especially fascinating because he brings together so many of my interests. he brings together civil rights, human rights, progressive religion, gay rights, nonviolence and pacifism, and the list goes on. so there we have in one person so many of these rights coming together. and mila's right to note that bayard really saw the linkages between discrimination and prejudice in ways that i think a lot of other civil rights leaders missed. and he did partly because of who he was. he was somebody who wa