Four Hundred Souls
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Brandon R. Byrd is a scholar of Black intellectual and social history and an assistant professor of history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti (2020). His current research projects include a grassroots and transnational history of the postslavery United States, tentatively titled Prophets, Vagabonds, and Princes: A History of Emancipation.
Charles E. (“Charlie”) Cobb, Jr., is a veteran of SNCC who served as a field secretary for the organization in Mississippi in 1962–67. He is the author of several books about the civil rights struggle, most recently This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (2014). He is a board member of the SNCC Legacy Project, which in collaboration with Duke University in 2017 launched a digital gateway into SNCC and its work (snccdigital.org). As a journalist, Cobb has worked for NPR and Frontline. He was the first Black staff writer for National Geographic magazine, in 1985–97. He is a co-founder of the National Association of Black Journalists. In June 2018, he received a Carnegie Fellowship for his latest book project, describing and analyzing the young Movement for Black Lives.
William A. (“Sandy”) Darity, Jr., is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, Economics, and Business at Duke University. He is the founding director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, and he has served as chair of Duke’s department of African and African American studies. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class, and ethnicity; stratification economics; schooling and the racial achievement gap; North-South theories of trade and development; skin shade and labor market outcomes; the economics of reparations; the Atlantic slave trade, the Industrial Revolution, and the history of economics; and the social-psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. In 2017 he was named to the Politico 50 list of the most influential policy thinkers over the course of the previous year, and he was honored by the Center for Global Policy Solutions with an award recognizing his work in the development of the effort to study and reverse racial wealth disparities in the United States. He holds a PhD in economics from MIT and has published or edited thirteen books and more than 300 articles in professional journals. His most recent book, co-authored with Kirsten Mullen, is From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century (2020).
Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela Y. Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator—both at the university level and in the larger public sphere—has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. She is the author of ten books, including Women, Race and Class (1981), Blues Legacies and Black Feminisms: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998), Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues (2003), and most recently, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2015). She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial after being placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without carceral systems and to help forge a twenty-first-century abolitionist movement.
Sylviane A. Diouf, a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, is an award-winning historian and curator of the African diaspora. She has authored and edited thirteen acclaimed books, including Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (2014), Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (1998), and Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship “Clotilda” and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (2007). She has curated twelve exhibitions. Dr. Diouf has received the Rosa Parks Award, the Pen and Brush Achievement Award, and the Dr. Betty Shabazz Achievement Award; has appeared in several documentaries; and gave a keynote speech to the UN General Assembly on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. She was the inaugural director of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Deborah Douglas is the Eugene S. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University and a senior leader with the OpEd Project, leading fellowships and programs at organizations that include the University of Texas at Austin, Dartmouth College, Columbia University, Urgent Action Fund in South Africa and Kenya, and Youth Narrating Our World. While teaching at her alma mater, Northwestern University’s Medill School, she created a graduate investigative journalism capstone on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and taught best practices in Karachi, Pakistan. An award-winning journalist and the first managing editor of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, Douglas is author of U.S. Civil Rights Trail: A Traveler’s Guide to the People, Places, and Events That Made the Movement (2021).
Michelle Duster is a writer, speaker, professor, and advocate for racial and gender equity in public history. She has initiated and supported dozens of local, state, and national initiatives for street names, markers, murals, and monuments to honor her paternal great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and other African American female historic figures. She has worked on PBS documentary films and organized several film festivals. She has written articles for The North Star, HuffPost, and other publications, and she has authored, edited, or contributed to sixteen books, including Ida B. the Queen (2021), Michelle Obama’s Impact on African American Women and Girls (2018), Ida from Abroad (2010), and Ida in Her Own Words (2008). Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, she has received numerous awards, including the 2019 Martin Luther King Jr. Social Justice Award from Dartmouth College and the Multi-Generational Activist Award from the Illinois Human Rights Commission.
Crystal N. Feimster is an associate professor in the department of African American Studies, the American studies program, and the history department at Yale University. She earned her PhD in history from Princeton University and her BA in history and women’s studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (2009). She is currently completing a manuscript, Truth Be Told: Rape and Mutiny in Civil War Louisiana.
James Forman, Jr., is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He attended public schools in Detroit and New York City before graduating from the Atlanta public schools. After attending Brown University and Yale Law School, he worked as a law clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. After clerking, he took a job at the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where he represented juveniles and adults in felony and misdemeanor cases. In 1997 he co-founded the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for youth who have struggled in school, dropped out, or been arrested. The school recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary. His first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Alicia Garza is an organizer, political strategist, and cheeseburger enthusiast. She is the principal at the Black Futures Lab and the Black to the Future Action Fund; the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network; strategy and partnerships director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance; and host of the podcast Lady Don’t Take No. Her first book was The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (2020).
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controv
ersy (1997); Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, a collaboration with Vernon Jordan (2001); Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (2002); a volume of essays that she edited, Andrew Johnson (2010); and, most recently, with Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (2016). Gordon-Reed was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queen’s College) in 2014–15. Between 2010 and 2015, she was the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was the 2018–19 president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and she is the current president of the Ames Foundation. A selected list of her honors includes a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize. Gordon-Reed was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and was a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019 she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Farah Jasmine Griffin is the inaugural chair of the African American and African diaspora studies department at Columbia University. She is also the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature. She received her BA from Harvard and her PhD in American studies from Yale. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative (1995), Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford Connecticut, 1854–1868 (1999), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (2001), and Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (2013). She is the co-author, with Salim Washington, of Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (2008).
Kali Nicole Gross is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Her research explores Black women’s experiences in the U.S. criminal justice system. Her opinion pieces have been published by BBC News, HuffPost, and The Washington Post, and she has appeared on NPR and C-SPAN. She has authored two award-winning books: Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (2006) and Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (2016). Her latest book, co-authored with Daina Ramey Berry, is A Black Women’s History of the United States (2020).
Alexis Pauline Gumbs portrayed Phillis Wheatley in first grade in the Black History Month play at her all-white private school. She wrote her first literary essay, on June Jordan’s “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America: Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley,” while in her first year at Barnard College, which is also June Jordan’s alma mater. Gumbs is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2016), M Archive: After the End of the World (2018), and Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020), and is co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (2016). She is the founder of Brilliance Remastered, creative writing editor for Feminist Studies, and celebrant in residence at NorthStar Church of the Arts in Durham, North Carolina, where she and her partner, Sangodare, are creating an intergenerational living library of Black Queer Brilliance.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center (1981) and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies at Spelman College. She has published a number of texts in African American and women’s studies that have been noted as important works by other scholars, including the first anthology on Black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (1979), which she co-edited with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye Parker Smith; her dissertation, Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880–1920 (1990); and Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (1995). Her most recent publication is an anthology co-edited with Johnnetta B. Cole, Who Should Be First?: Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign (2010). In 1983 she became founding co-editor of Sage: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women, devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African descent. She is the past president of the National Women’s Studies Association and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017).
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter covering racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine and creator of the landmark 1619 Project. In 2017 she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, known as the Genius Grant, for her work on educational inequality. She has also won a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, and the 2018 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism from Columbia University. In 2016 she co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a training and mentorship organization geared toward increasing the numbers of investigative reporters of color.
Michael Harriot is an award-winning journalist with The Root, where he covers the intersection of race, politics, and culture. He earned degrees in mass communications and history from Auburn University and a master’s in international business and macroeconomics from Florida State University. He was a 2018 fellow at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Center on Media, Crime, and Justice and created the curriculum for the course “Race as an Economic Construct.” He is also a heralded spoken word poet and won the National Association of Black Journalists Award for television newswriting and digital commentary. A native of Hartsville, South Carolina, he currently resides in Birmingham, Alabama.
Mary E. Hicks is an assistant professor of Black studies and history at Amherst College. She has served as a Mamolen Fellow at Harvard University, as well as a Ford Fellow and Jefferson Fellow. Her research examines the maritime dimensions of the African diaspora, with a particular focus on eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century colonial Brazil. She is the author of “Financing the Luso-Atlantic Slave Trade: Collective Investment Practices from Portugal to Brazil, 1500–1840” and “Transatlantic Threads of Meaning: West African Textile Entrepreneurship in Salvador da Bahia, 1770–1870,” both published in the journal Slavery & Abolition. Her forthcoming book is Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721–1835.
DaMaris B. Hill is the author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland (2020), which was nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland (2016), and Vi-zә-bәl Teks-chәrs (Visible Textures) (2015). She has a keen interest in the work of Toni Morrison and theories regarding “rememory” as a philosophy and aesthetic practice. Similar to her creative process, Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary. Hill is an associate professor of English, creative writing, and African American studies at the University of Kentucky.
Allyson Hobbs is an associate professor of American history, the director of African and African American studies, and the Kleinheinz Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. She is a contributing writer to The New Yorker. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and The Washington Post. She has appeared on C-SPAN, MSNBC, and NPR. Her first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (2014), won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history, and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history. The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book, and it was listed by The Root as one of the Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors.
Tera W. Hunter is the Edwards Professor of American History and a
professor of African American studies at Princeton University. She is a scholar of labor, gender, race, and Southern history. Her most recent book is Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (2017), which won the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History; the Mary Nickliss Prize, Organization of American Historians; the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize and the Littleton-Griswold Prize, American Historical Association; the Willie Lee Rose Book Award, Southern Association of Women’s Historians; and the Deep South Book Prize, Frances S. Sumersell Center for the Study of the South. It was also a finalist for the Lincoln Prize, Gettysburg College, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute. To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (1997) also won multiple awards. She co-edited Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas (2004) with Sandra Gunning and Michele Mitchell and African American Urban Studies: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present (2004) with Joe W. Trotter and Earl Lewis. She has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. A native of Miami, Florida, she received a BA from Duke University and a PhD from Yale University.