Mary Frances Berry is Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of numerous books and articles including, And Justice for All: The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle for Freedom in America and Power in Words: The Stories behind Barack Obama's Speeches from the State House to the White House.

Since her college years at Howard University, Mary Frances Berry has been one of the most visible activists in the cause of civil rights, gender equality and social justice in our nation. Serving as Chairperson of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Berry demanded equal rights and liberties for all Americans during four Presidential administrations. A pathbreaker, she also became the first woman to head a major research university, serving at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Berry also served as the principal education official in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, working to improve access and quality education in our schools.

Her latest book, History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times, "proves to us through myriad historical examples that protest is an essential ingredient of politics, and that progressive movements can and will flourish, even in perilous times."

LaShawn Harris is an Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University and former Managing and Book Review Editor for the Journal of African American History. She is a historian of U. S. history with a focus on African American, Black Women’s, and urban histories. Harris’s scholarly essays have appeared in Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, and SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. Her first monograph, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2016 and won the Organization of American Historians’ Darlene Clark Hine award and the Philip Taft Labor Prize from The Labor and Working-Class History Association. Harris is also the author of Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City, published by Beacon Press.

Shannon King is Associate Professor of History and director of the Black Studies program at Fairfield University where he teaches courses on the Black Freedom Struggle, Urban and Social History, Gender and Women's History, carceral studies, and racial capitalism. His work has appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Urban History, and Reviews in American History; and essays in Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North, and Escape from New York! He is the author of Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?: Community and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era and The Politics of Safety: The Black Struggle for Police Accountability in La Guardia's New York.