Sherrilyn Ifill is the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. LDF was founded in 1940 by legendary civil rights lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall, and became a separate organization from the NAACP in 1957. The lawyers at LDF developed and executed the legal strategy that led to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, widely regarded as the most transformative and monumental legal decision of the twentieth century. Ifill is the second woman to lead the organization.
Kellie Carter Jackson is the Knafel Assistant Professor of the Humanities in the department of Africana studies at Wellesley College. Her book Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (2019) won the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, was a finalist for the Stone Book Award at the Museum of African American History, and was named among thirteen books to read on African American history by The Washington Post. She is co-editor of Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, and Memory. Her essays have been featured in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, TIME, Transition, The Conversation, Black Perspectives, and Quartz. She has also been interviewed for her expertise by MSNBC, SkyNews (UK), The New York Times, PBS, Vox, HuffPost, C-SPAN, the BBC, Boston Public Radio, Al Jazeera International, and Slate. She has been featured in a host of documentaries on history and race in the United States.
Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel, The Residue Years (2013), received wide critical praise and won a Whiting Award as well as the Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, TIME, Esquire, and elsewhere. The author of the nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family (2019), he teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.
Karine Jean-Pierre is a seasoned political operative whose professional experience includes running presidential campaigns, leading grassroots activism, and working in the Obama White House. During the 2020 campaign cycle, Jean-Pierre drove strategy and executed major initiatives for the Biden-Harris presidential campaign as senior adviser to the campaign and chief of staff to the vice presidential nominee, Senator Kamala Harris. Prior to this, she served as the chief public affairs officer for MoveOn, one of the nation’s largest grassroots progressive organizations, and as a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Jean-Pierre is a veteran of electoral and advocacy campaigns on a local, state, and national level. She served as the deputy campaign manager for Martin O’Malley for President in 2016, and she led the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Initiative as campaign manager. In 2013 she managed Tish James’s successful campaign for New York City Public Advocate. Jean-Pierre is proud to be an alumna of the Obama White House and both the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. In 2011 Jean-Pierre served as deputy battleground states director for President Obama’s reelection campaign, managing the president’s political engagement in key states while leading the delegate selection and ballot access process. Before joining the 2012 campaign, she served as the regional political director for the White House Office of Political Affairs. She was the Southeast regional political director on the Obama for America campaign in 2008, and served the John Edwards for President campaign in the same capacity earlier in the 2008 election cycle.
Martha S. Jones is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how Black Americans have shaped the history of democracy. She is the award-winning author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2008), and “All Bound Up Together”: The Woman Question in African-American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (2007). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, TIME, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She lives in Baltimore, where she is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and a professor of history at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Robert Jones, Jr., is the author of the novel The Prophets (2021). Born and raised in New York City, he has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Essence, and The Paris Review. He is the creator of the social justice social-media community Son of Baldwin, which can be found on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Peniel Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and in the history department in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. In addition to being a frequent commentator on issues of race, democracy, and civil rights, Joseph wrote the award-winning books Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (2006) and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama (2010). His most recent book, Stokely: A Life (2014), has been called the definitive biography of Stokely Carmichael, the man who popularized the phrase “Black Power.” He edited The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era (2006) and Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level (2010).
Blair L. M. Kelley is assistant dean for interdisciplinary studies and international programs in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and associate professor of history at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010), which won the prestigious Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Kelley is currently at work on Black Folk: The Promise of the Black Working Class, which will be published by Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton.
Robin D. G. Kelley is a professor of history at UCLA. His books include Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009), Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002), and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990).
Donika Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium (2017) and the full-length collections The Renunciations (forthcoming) and Bestiary (2016), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. She currently lives in Iowa City and is an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
Bakari Kitwana is an internationally known cultural critic, journalist, activist, and thought leader in the area of hip-hop and Black youth political engagement. In 2020 he co-founded the Hip-Hop Political Education Coalition, which convened a major virtual summit on the ways the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated voter suppression efforts in Black and Brown communities. That convening builds on Kitwana’s work as executive director of Rap Sessions, which for the last fifteen years has conducted more than a hundred town hall meetings around the nation on difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop and millennial generations. Kitwana has been editor in chief of The Source, editorial director of Third World Press, and the co-founder of the 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention, and he served on the organizing committee for the 2013 Black Youth Project convening that launched the millennial Black activist group BYP100. The author of the groundbreaking book The Hip-Hop Generation (2002), Kitwana is also the author of Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop (2005), collaborating writer for pioneering hip-hop artist Rakim’s memoir Sweat the Technique: Revelations on Creativity from the Lyrical Genius (2019), and co-editor of the anthology Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People (2020). As the 2019–20 Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Resea
rch at Harvard University, he curated the Hiphop and Presidential Elections Video Archive, a collection of more thirty national town hall meetings with hip-hop artists, activists, and scholars during the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections.
Kiese Laymon is a Black Southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. His bestselling memoir Heavy: An American Memoir (2018) won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. Laymon is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Oxford American.
Christopher J. Lebron is an associate professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in political philosophy, social theory, philosophy of race, and democratic ethics. His first book, The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time (2013), won the American Political Science Association’s Foundations of Political Theory Best First Book Award. His second book, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (2017), offers a brief intellectual history of the Black Lives Matter movement. He is the winner of the 2018 Hiett Prize in the Humanities, which recognizes a “career devoted to the humanities and a candidate whose work shows extraordinary promise to have a significant impact on contemporary culture.” In addition to his scholarly publications, he is an active public intellectual, writing frequently for The New York Times’s philosophy column “The Stone,” Boston Review, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Billboard.
David A. Love is a writer, journalist, and commentator based in Philadelphia. He is a contributor to CNN Opinion, Al Jazeera, The Grio, and Atlanta Black Star, among other publications. He has taught journalism and media studies as an adjunct professor at Rutgers University and Temple University. Previously, he served as executive director of the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus, executive director of Witness to Innocence, and a law clerk to two federal judges. Love received a BA in East Asian studies from Harvard University, a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and a certificate in international human rights law from the University of Oxford.
Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement (2016).
Kyle T. Mays (Black/Saginaw Anishinaabe) is an assistant professor in the department of African American studies, the American Indian Studies Center, and the department of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a transdisciplinary scholar of Afro-Indigenous studies, urban studies, and contemporary popular culture. He is the author of Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (2018). He has two forthcoming books: City of Dispossessions: African Americans, Indigenous Peoples, and the Creation of Modern Detroit and An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States.
Bernice L. McFadden is the author of Praise Song for the Butterflies (2018), which was long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Book of Harlan (2016), winner of the American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Her eight other critically acclaimed novels include Sugar (2001), Loving Donovan (2003), Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), and Glorious (2010), which was featured in O: The Oprah Magazine and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of four awards from the Black Caucus American Library Association.
Heather C. McGhee advances solutions to racial and economic inequality in the United States. During her tenure as president of the inequality-focused think tank Demos (2014–18), she drafted legislation, testified before Congress, and became a regular contributor on NBC’s Meet the Press. She led Demos’s racial equity organizational transformation, resulting in a doubling of its racial diversity and growth across all measures of organizational impact. She was a leader in passing key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010 as well as landmark consumer protections that have saved consumers over $50 billion in credit card fees. She is the chair of the board of Color of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization. Her first book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (2021), is forthcoming from One World.
Tiya Miles is the author of three multiple-prize-winning histories, most recently The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (2017). She has published historical fiction, a study of haunted Southern sites, and academic articles and chapters, as well as op-eds in various venues. Her work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her forthcoming book, which will be released by Random House, is titled All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. Miles is currently a professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.
Brentin Mock is a writer and editor for Bloomberg CityLab in Pittsburgh, focused on issues of racial, economic, and environmental justice.
Jennifer L. Morgan is a professor of history in the department of social and cultural analysis at New York University, which she also serves as chair. She is the author of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in the Making of New World Slavery (2004) and the co-editor of Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (2016). Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in the Black Atlantic world. Her recent journal articles include “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery” in Small Axe (2018), “Accounting for ‘The Most Excruciating Torment’: Trans-Atlantic Passages” in History of the Present (2016), and “Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism” in Social Text (2015). In addition to her archival work as a historian, Morgan has published a range of essays on race, gender, and the process of “doing history,” most notably “Experiencing Black Feminism” in Deborah Gray White’s edited volume Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2007). Her newest work, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, considers colonial numeracy, racism, and the rise of the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic world, and will be published by Duke University Press in spring 2021.
Pamela Newkirk is a professor of journalism at New York University and the author of Diversity Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business (2019), Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (2016), and Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media (2000). She is the editor of Letters from Black America (2011).
Ijeoma Oluo is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race (2018) and Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America (2020). Her work on race has been featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among many others. She has twice been named to the Root 100, and she received the 2018 Feminist Humanist Award and the 2020 Harvard Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
Deirdre Cooper Owens is the Linda and Charles Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and director of the Humanities in Medicine program at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She is an Organization of American Historians’ distinguished lecturer and a past American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists research fellow, and has won a number of prestigious honors for her scholarly and advocacy work in reproductive and birthing justice. A popular public speaker, Dr. Cooper Owens has spoken widely across the United States and Europe. She has published articles, essays, book chapters, and think pieces on a number of issues that concern African American experiences and reproductive justice. Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017), won the 2018 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the Organization of American Historians as the b
est book on African American women’s and gender history.
Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the California Book Award–nominated young adult novel Who Put This Song On? (2019) and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night (2015), There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (2017), and Magical Negro (2019), which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award and California Book Award. Her debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. Parker’s work has appeared in such publications as The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, TIME, Best American Poetry, and Playbill. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She lives in Los Angeles.
Nakia D. Parker is a College of Social Science dean’s research associate in the Department of History at Michigan State University. Her research and teaching interests include slavery, migration, African American history, and Native American history. Her current book manuscript, Trails of Tears and Freedom: Black Life in Indian Slave Country, 1830–1866, examines the forced migrations, labor practices, kinship networks, and resistance strategies of people of African and Afro-Native descent in Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholding communities. In addition to her academic articles, her research has been featured on several public history websites and television, including The History Channel, Teaching Hard History, and 15 Minute History.
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