Hello, I'm Bill Moyers. I paid a visit to New York Public Library's

Schaumburg Center for Research in Black Culture recently to help a large gathering of

the Schaumburg's devoted friends and visitors say goodbye, very reluctantly, to Dr.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad. He's been the beloved director

of the Schaumburg for the past five years and has done much to expand the reach and influence

of the Harlem Institution that devotes itself to researching and disseminating the history

of African Americans. But Muhammad is also a scholar, and he's

now eager to evaluate everything he has gleaned about the contemporary concerns of Black America

from a new vantage point. He's on his way to join Harvard University's faculty as a professor

of history, race, and public policy at the Kennedy School of Government.

This young historian is uniquely well suited to ponder the contradictions of the past, the present, and the future.

Muhammad grew up on Chicago's South Side.

He's the great-grandson of Elijah Muhammad, who led the nation of Islam for decades.

And he's the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and an educator.

I first interviewed Muhammad in 2012 about the founding paradox of our country that our

Constitution promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness despite the entrenched

institution of slavery.

Contradiction is part of the human experience. We wrestle with it every single day, whether we admit it or not.

Thomas Jefferson and half of the other slaveholders who were presidents all lived daily contradictions.

They could literally look out their windows and see enslaved people in the land of

the free and the home of the brave, so on and so forth. But the fact of the matter is that they had a

great responsibility for building what would become American democracy. And in that regard,

...