Rosemary Ndubuizu is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University. Dr. Ndubuizu is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies how housing policies are shaped by race, gender, political economy, and ideology. Originally from Inglewood, CA, she relocated to D.C. and eventually became a community organizer with Organizing Neighborhood Equity DC, which is a D.C.-based community organization that organizes long-time Washingtonians of color to campaign for more local and federal investments in affordable housing and living-wage jobs. Her work historically and ethnographically traces how low-income black women have been affected by post-1970s changes in public and affordable housing policies and advocacy. Her research project also examines the contemporary landscape of affordable housing policy and politics to better understand why low-income black women remain vulnerable to eviction, displacement, and housing insecurity in cities like the District of Columbia. Additionally, her work presents the organizing challenges low-income black women tenant activists in D.C. face as they organize to combat the city’s reduction and privatization of affordable housing. Dr. Ndubuizu’s teaching interests include social policy, post-civil rights black politics, the black radical tradition including black feminism, social movements, the political economy of non-profits, and women of color feminisms. Her recent book, The Undesirable Many: Black Women and Their Struggles against Displacement and Housing Insecurity in the Nation’s Capital was published by UNC Press.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction in 2018. Her third book, Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s, is forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press.

Taylor is a widely sought public speaker and writer. In 2016, she was named one that one hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, and beyond.

Taylor received her PhD in African American Studies at Northwestern University in 2013. She is assistant professor in the department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Deborah N. Archer is Associate Dean for Experiential Education and Clinical Programs, the Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Law, and Faculty Director of the Community Equity Initiative. Deborah is also the President of the ACLU, the first person of color to serve in that role in the organization’s history, and a nationally recognized expert on civil liberties, civil rights, and racial justice. Deborah is an award-winning teacher and legal scholar whose articles have appeared in leading law reviews and national publications, and she has offered commentary for national and international media. Prior to full-time teaching, Deborah worked as an attorney with the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where she litigated in the areas of voting rights, employment discrimination, educational equity, and school desegregation. Deborah also previously served as Chair of the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, the nation’s oldest and largest police oversight agency. Deborah has won many awards and is also the author of the national best-selling book Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality.

Professor Mia Bay is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge. Professor Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history whose recent interests include black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. Bay’s most recent book is the prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Her other works include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925; To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells, and the edited work Ida B Wells, The Light of Truth: The Writings of An Anti-Lynching Crusader. She is also the co-author of the textbook Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents, and the co-editor of two collections of essays: Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line. Bay’s current projects include a new book on the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson.  Her recent public history work includes working with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) on one of its inaugural exhibits-- “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation 1876–1968”—and serving a scholarly advisor to the Library of Congress and NMAAHC’s Civil Rights History Project.