Charles M. Payne is the Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Rutgers University Newark and the Director of the Joseph Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Research. His research and teaching interests include urban education and school reform, social inequality, social change and modern African American history, particularly the Black Freedom Struggle. His books include So Much Reform, So Little Change, which examines the persistence of failure in urban schools, and a co-edited anthology, Teach Freedom: The African American Tradition of Education For Liberation, which is concerned with education as a tool for liberation from Reconstruction through Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools. He is also the author of Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure In Urban Education and I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. He is co-author of Debating the Civil Rights Movement and co-editor of Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850 -1950.

Payne has been a member of the Board of the Chicago Algebra Project, of the Steering Committee for the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the Board of Directors of MDRC, the Research Advisory Committee for the Chicago Annenberg Project, and the advisory board for Teacher College Press’ series on social justice. He is a co-founder of the Duke Curriculum Project, which involved university faculty in the professional development of public school teachers and also co-founder of the John Hope Franklin Scholars, which tries to better prepare high school youngsters for college. He is among the founders of the Education for Liberation Network, which encourages the development of educational initiatives that encourage young people to think critically about social issues and understand their own capacity for addressing them. Payne was also founding director of the Urban Education Project in Orange, New Jersey, a nonprofit community center that tried to interest urban youngsters in technical careers. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the acting executive director of the Woodlawn Children’s Promise Community, an effort, modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone, to dramatically improve youth outcomes in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago.

Emilye Crosby has been a member of the Geneseo faculty since 1995. Prof. Crosby studies and teaches African-American history and the modern Civil Rights Movement. She has received numerous awards--for her teaching, scholarship, and service. These include the Chancellor's Award for Teaching, the Harter Mentoring Award, the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Faculty Service, and the President's Award for Research and Creativity. Her first book, A Little Taste of Freedom, won the McLemore Prize and was awarded an honorable mention for the Organization of American Historians' Liberty Legacy Prize.

Dr. Emilye Crosby has been a member of SUNY Geneseo's History Department since 1995 and was the coordinator of the Black Studies/Africana program from fall 2002 through Spring 2018. She has written A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi and edited Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement. Dr. Crosby is also the coordinator of SUNY Geneseo's annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration. She teaches a wide range of history, general education, and interdisciplinary courses, with a particular interest in the Civil Rights Movement, African American history, and women's history.

Dr. Jeffries is Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University. He specializes in 20th century African American history and has an expertise in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. He is the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York University Press, 2009). Bloody Lowndes tells the remarkable story of the local people and SNCC organizers who ushered in the Black Power era by transforming rural Lowndes County, Alabama. He is also the editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, a collection of essays by leading civil rights scholars and teachers that explores how to teach the Civil Rights Movement accurately and effectively.

Charles E. Cobb Jr. is a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and has taught at Brown University. An award-winning journalist, he is an inductee of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. He is the author of a number of books including This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books, 2014). Cobb lives in Jacksonville, Florida.