We are grateful to our tremendously supportive advisory
board, which gave us invaluable guidance from the inception
of this endeavor until the final printing.
Bill
Bigelow. Social studies teacher, Franklin
High School, Portland, Oregon. Editor for Rethinking
Schools. Teaching for Change senior curriculum consultant.
Author and editor of numerous curricula, including Rethinking
Columbus and Rethinking Globalization.
Toni Blackman.
Rapper, poet, and performance artist in Harlem, New York.
Founding director of Freestyle Union and the Artist Development
Institute. U.S. Hip-Hop Ambassador. Author of Inner-Course:
A Plea for Real Love.
Elsa Barkley Brown.
Associate professor of History and Women’s Studies
at the University of Maryland—College Park where she
teaches courses on women in the Civil Rights Movement. Coeditor,
Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia.
Elise Bryant.
Senior Staff Associate, National
Labor College, Silver Spring, Maryland. Prior to this
she was program associate at the Union Minorities/Women’s
Leadership Training Program, University of Michigan’s
Labor Studies Center. Also a singer and actress.
Clayborne Carson.
History professor at Stanford University; Director of the
Martin Luther
King Jr. Papers Project (joint project of King Center,
the King Estate, and Stanford University); Advisor to Eyes
on the Prize, author of In Struggle: SNCC and the
Black Awakening of the 1960s.
Charles Cobb Jr.
Former Field Secretary for SNCC. Co-author with Bob Moses
of Radical Equations: Organizing Math Literacy in America's
Schools. Senior Diplomatic Correspondent, allAfrica.com,
Washington, DC.
Bill Fletcher Jr.
President of TransAfrica
Forum, a nonprofit in Washington, DC, which serves as
a major research, educational, and organizing institution
for the African-American community offering constructive
analyses of issues concerning U.S. policy as it affects
Africa and the Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America.
James Forman.
Former executive secretary of SNCC; president of the Unemployment
and Poverty Action Council (UPAC) in Washington, DC, and
author of several books, including Sammy Young Jr.,
The Political Thought of James Forman, The
Makings of Black Revolutionaries, and Self-Determination:
An Examination of the Question & Its Application to
the African-American People.
Danny Glover.
Activist, actor, film director. Former Black Panther and
prominent activist from San Francisco Bay Area. Starred
in Freedom Song, Buffalo Soldiers, Mandela,
Beloved, The Color Purple, and many others.
Board chair, TransAfrica Forum.
Juan Gonzalez.
Journalist, columnist for New York Daily News;
President of National Association of Hispanic Journalists;
co-founder of UNITY: Journalists of Color; co-host of Democracy
Now!; most recent book is Fallout: The Environmental
Consequences of the World Trade Center Attack.
Lawrence Guyot.
Mississippi civil rights activist, former field secretary
for SNCC; program monitor for Washington, DC’s Office
of Early Childhood Development, ANC Commissioner in Washington,
DC, active in local efforts to promote citizen empowerment
and youth leadership, and provides training for young people
in groups such as Operation Understanding.
Suheir Hammad.
Author and poet. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies
as well as her own publications, Born Palestinian,
Born Black and Drops of This Story. One
of the original cast members and writers of the 2003 Tony
Award-winning Def Poetry Jam. Visit her website
here.
Sylvia Hill.
Professor of Criminal Justice and co-director of the Institute
for Public Safety and Justice. One of the organizers of
the 1974 Sixth Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Founding member of the grassroots organization, the Southern
Africa Support Project and the 1984 Free South Africa Movement.
On the Board of TransAfrica Forum.
Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez.
Chicana writer, activist, and teacher. Author of 500
Years of Chicano History, De Colores Means All
of Us: Latina Views for a Multicolored Century, and
Letters from Mississippi. Director of the Institute
for MultiRacial Justice in San Francisco, a resource center
to help build alliances between peoples of color. An editor
of the national newspaper WarTimes.
Nancy Murray.
Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts’s Bill of Rights
Education Project since its founding in November 1987; founder
of Project HIP-HOP, a rolling civil rights education classroom
for high school students; editorial advisor to London’s
Institute of Race Relations’ journal, Race &
Class.
Charles Payne.
Professor of History & African American Studies, Duke
University. Author, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom:
The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights
Movement, Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity
of Success and Failure in Urban Education, and Time
Longer Than Rope: A Century of African-American Activism,
1850-1950.
Renee Poussaint.
Veteran network journalist and winner of three Emmy awards;
president of Wisdom
Works and producer of Tutu & Franklin.
Executive Director of the National
Visionary Leadership Project, a web-based archive of
first-person video biographies of community-based and national
African-American leaders.
Sonia Sanchez.
Poet, educator, and activist. Author of over a dozen poetry
collections, including Homegirls & Handgrenades
and Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems.
Honors include the Community Service Award from the National
Black Caucus of State Legislators, the Lucretia Mott Award,
the Peace and Freedom Award from Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a National Endowment
for the Arts Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
Lynda Tredway.
Coordinator of the Principal Leadership Institute, UC Berkeley,
where she works with master's candidates who are preparing
to be administrators in urban schools in the Bay Area. Teaching
for Change board member.
Stephen Ward.
Assistant professor in the Center for Afroamerican and African
Studies and the Residential College at the University of
Michigan, where he teaches courses on the Black Power Movement,
black radical thought, and urban and community studies.
He is also a board member of the James
and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership,
a nonprofit community-based organization in Detroit, Michigan.
Debbie Wei.
Lead Academic Coach in Asian-Pacific-American Studies for
the School District of Philadelphia and co-editor of Resistance
in Paradise: Rethinking 100 Years of U.S. Involvement in
the Caribbean and the Pacific. Founder and board member
of Asian Americans United.
Juan Williams.
Senior correspondent for NPR’s Morning Edition,
former host of Talk of the Nation, author of many
books, including Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary
and Eyes on the Prize; was Washington Post
journalist for 21 years.
Yohuru R. Williams.
Chair, African-American Studies, Delaware State University.
Author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights,
Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven. Lead
editor of A Constant Struggle: African-American History
from 1865 to the Present, Documents and Essays and
Soul of Black Folks: Centennial Reflections.
Howard Zinn.
Professor Emeritus, Boston University. While chair of the
history department of Spellman, became active in the Southern
Civil Rights Movement and an advisor to SNCC. Author of
many books including SNCC: The New Abolitionists
and the classic A People’s History of the United
States.