On June 8, 270 people went to Princeton University’s Friend Center to hear historian and social commentator Khalid Gibran Muhammad, shown at right, be interviewed by Princeton lawyer and artist Rhinold Lamar Ponder, left.

The discussion centered around Muhammad’s book “The Condemnation of Blackness.” He analyzed racism in America and explained how criminal statistics developed and were misused to create a false and negative perception of black people. Muhammad is the outgoing director of the Schaumburg Library and an incoming tenured professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. After the event, which was co-sponsored by the Princeton Human Services Commission with the Princeton Public Library and Not in Our Town, Mayor Liz Lempert and Councilman Lance Liverman presented a proclamation to Muhammad thanking him for his participation and contributions to the discussion on racism.