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.