Advisors

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); Adviser 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 ofRadical 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.

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 Spelman, became active in the Southern Civil Rights Movement and an adviser to SNCC. Author of many books including SNCC: The New Abolitionists and the classic A People’s History of the United States.

Note that the affiliations above are from the time of the book’s publication in 2004.