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.

Dr. Brittany Friedman is a sociologist, cultural & political theorist, author, and spiritual herbalist. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, where she received the 2024 Raubenheimer Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. Much of her work is organized around investigating and making sense of the grave harms we grapple with in our society and how they are perpetrated by individuals and institutions who use power to engage in disinformation, target vulnerable populations, and reproduce social and economic inequalities. Like Ida B. Wells and other seers before us, we must look until we cannot sit still. Once we uncover these harms, the work is to dream a path forward. To this end, Dr. Friedman also focuses her energy on restoring harmony through reimagining how we can heal and transform systems of oppression and control into structures of life, joy, and creativity. She is the author of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons.

Aaron G. Fountain, Jr. is a historian who studies high school student activism in the 1960s and 1970s, covering themes of education, race, political radicalism, and surveillance. He holds a Doctorate in History from Indiana University, and writes and presents public talks about twentieth-century American political and social history. His first book is High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America. He has also begun his second book project, a cultural and political history of teenagers and the Vietnam War in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Dr. Fountain has published widely in academic and public-facing outlets, and his freelance essays explore themes of student activism, race and ethnicity, and online misogyny.

Joshua Clark Davis is an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Baltimore. He is also the author of Police Against The Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back, a retelling of the civil rights movement through its overlooked work against police violence—and the police who attacked the movement with surveillance, undercover agents, and retaliatory prosecutions. His first book, From Head Shops to Whole Foods, examines organic food stores, feminist enterprises, Black bookstores and other businesses that emerged from movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Dr. Davis has published widely and earned awards from the Fulbright Program, the Silvers Foundation, and the NEH Public Scholars Program.