Islam Among Urban Blacks

Black in Boston and Beyond

In this episode Dr. Hettie V. Williams interviews Professor Mikal Nash of Essex County Community College located in Newark, New Jersey. Williams is the current director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture at UMass Boston. Nash is the author of Islam Among Urban Blacks: Muslims in Newark, New Jersey A Social History (2008), and Islam and the Black Experience (2018), a native Newarker, and a part-time lecturer in the Department of African American Studies and African Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. He has also participated in the American Cities and Public Spaces Project organized by the Library of Congress funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Black Muslims have long been a part of American history from the early Colonial Era down to the present as Nash attests in this conversation. Many from the Black Muslim community have contributed to the development of America’s cities as workers, professionals, businessmen women and men including in places such as Newark, Deroit, and Boston. Nash here traverses this history in some detail to highlight the history of Islam among urban Blacks in America.