Race and Democracy: Recent Episodes
Dr. Peniel Joseph
Dr. Peniel Joseph, Founding Director of the UT Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and Professor of History, discusses issues of race, democracy, public policy, and social justice with expert guests. "Race and Democracy" questions who is America? Where have we been, where do we want to go, and how can we get there? Tune in to learn about American history, race and democracy, and the outlook for the future.
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P. Gabrielle Foreman, PhD, is an award-winning professor of English, African American Studies, and History. A leader in the field of Black digital and public history, Dr. Foreman has been recognized for co-creating projects that build community and institutions while addressing pipeline and equity issues. As a teacher, scholar, and mentor, Dr. Foreman is committed […]
Dr. Garcia-Rios was born and raised in Durango, México, but considers El Paso, Texas, his second home. His research investigates the formation and transformation of Latino identities as well as the political implications of these transformations. He also examines voter turnout, political participation and public opinion, especially among Latino immigrants. Dr. Garcia-Rios’s other academic interests […]
Michael Eric Dyson is a man of many talents. As a professor, he has taught at some of the most prestigious universities in the nation, including Princeton, Brown, and Georgetown. He is currently a Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University, where he holds positions in both the College of Arts & Science and The Divinity School.
In addition to his academic pursuits, Dyson is also a gifted writer and media personality. He has authored over 25 books, including seven New York Times bestsellers, and has won numerous awards for his literary contributions, including the 2020 Langston Hughes Medal and two NAACP Image Awards.
Dyson’s work spans a wide range of topics, including civil rights, hip-hop, Black culture, and politics. He has written bestselling books on figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, 2Pac, Marvin Gaye, Bill Cosby, and Barack Obama. His most recent book, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America, has been described as a “searing cry for racial justice” and a “sweeping overview of racism in America.”
Julia Sweig is an award-winning author of books on Cuba, Latin America, and American foreign policy. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, the Nation, the National Interest, and in Brazil’s Folha de São Paulo, among other outlets. Her book Inside the Cuban Revolution won the American Historical Association’s 2003 Herbert Feis Award. She served as senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations for fifteen years and concurrently led the Aspen Institute’s congressional seminar on Latin America for ten years. She holds a doctorate and master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University. She is a non-resident senior research fellow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin and the host creator, host and executive producer of the podcast In Plain Sight, a co-production of Best Case Studios and ABC Audio. She lives with her family outside of Washington, D.C.
Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations. Mr. Sunstein is author of many articles and books, including Republic.com (2001), Risk and Reason (2002), Why Societies Need Dissent (2003), The Second Bill of Rights (2004), Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2005), Worst-Case Scenarios (2001), Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013) and most recently Why Nudge? (2014) and Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas (2014).
A prolific and energizing speaker on a range of diversity, equity, and inclusion topics, Shaun Harper has delivered hundreds of keynote addresses around the world, to audiences comprised of thousands. He also is founder and executive director of the USC Race and Equity Center. Dr. Harper has published 12 books, and is author of more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and other academic publications.
Shaun Harper, Ph.D. is the Clifford and Betty Allen Professor at the University of Southern California.
Danté Stewart is a minister, essayist, and cultural critic. He is author of Shoutin’ In The Fire: An American Epistle. Named by Religion News Service as one of “Ten Up-And-Coming Faith Influencers”, his work has appeared on CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN’s The Undefeated, Sojourners, and more.
He received his B.A. in Sociology from Clemson University. He is currently studying at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga.
Thomas A. Guglielmo is Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. He has a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. His first book, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago (Oxford, 2003), won the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Society of American Historians' Allan Nevins Prize. His second book, Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America's World War II Military (Oxford University Press, 2021), won the Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Award. His articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and other publications. His work has been supported by Harvard University's Charles Warren Center and Stanford University's Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity.
Estevan Daniel Delgado (he/him) is the Director for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. Estevan has formal project management experience running large-scale government grants and program management experience fundraising and designing trust-based grant making opportunities and events for the Hispanic Impact Fund at Austin Community Foundation. In his professional and community-based work, Estevan seeks to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion to ensure belonging for those underrepresented in spaces of power, especially for people of color, people that identify as queer, and people that identify as disabled.
Rodell Razor has over 10 years of experience in launching and coaching small and mid sized businesses. He has developed valuable skills in business strategy, operations, sales, leadership, and human resources through the businesses he launched as well as through corporate roles held at various firms. In addition to being CEO and Founder of X-Factor Capital serves as a director and co-founder on the Board of ConstructDiversity.
Jeremiah Captain has over 15 years of experience in sales marketing, public relations, and talent management. He has held various leadership roles in his entrepreneurial projects, his mandates as consultant or keynote speaker as well as various corporate roles. Jeremiah is a Co-Founder of X-Factor Consulting and serves as a Director and co-founder on the Board of ConstructDiversity.
Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times Bestseller and was longlisted for the National Book Award. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.
Clint received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.
This episode of Race and Democracy was mixed and mastered by Will Shute.
Adam Serwer is an American journalist and author. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic where his work focuses on politics, race, and justice. He previously worked at Buzzfeed News, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones.
Serwer has received awards from the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), The Root, and the Society of Professional Journalists. He was named a spring 2019 Shorenstein Center fellow, and received the 2019 Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism.
This episode of Race and Democracy was mixed and mastered by Sofia Salter.
Elise Hu is a host-at-large based at NPR West in Culver City, Calif. Previously, she explored the future with her video series, Future You with Elise Hu, and served as the founding bureau chief and International Correspondent for NPR's Seoul office. She was based in Seoul for nearly four years, responsible for the network's coverage of both Koreas and Japan, and filed from a dozen countries across Asia.
Before joining NPR, she was one of the founding reporters at The Texas Tribune, a non-profit digital news startup devoted to politics and public policy. While at the Tribune, Hu oversaw television partnerships and multimedia projects, contributed to The New York Times' expanded Texas coverage, and pushed for editorial innovation across platforms.
An honors graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia's School of Journalism, she previously worked as the state political reporter for KVUE-TV in Austin, WYFF-TV in Greenville, SC, and reported from Asia for the Taipei Times.
Her work at NPR has earned a DuPont-Columbia award and a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media for her video series, Elise Tries. Her previous work has earned a Gannett Foundation Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism, a National Edward R. Murrow award for best online video, and beat reporting awards from the Texas Associated Press. The Austin Chronicle once dubiously named her the "Best TV Reporter Who Can Write."
Outside of work, Hu has taught digital journalism at Northwestern University and Georgetown University's journalism schools and served as a guest co-host for TWIT.tv's program, Tech News Today. She's on the board of Grist Magazine and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
This episode of Race and Democracy was mixed and mastered by Oscar Kitmanyen and Sofia Salter.
Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies. He directs the History Design Studio and teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery in the Americas. Brown is the author of The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008), producer of Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, an audiovisual documentary broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, and is most recently the author of Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap Press, 2020).
This episode of Race and Democracy was mixed and mastered by Oscar Kitmanyen and Sofia Salter.
Peter Beinart teaches national reporting and opinion writing at the Newmark J-School and political science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is editor-at-large for Jewish Currents, a CNN political commentator, and a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He is also a nonfiction author and former Rhodes Scholar.
His first book, “The Good Fight,” was published by HarperCollins in 2006. His second book, “The Icarus Syndrome,” was published by HarperCollins in 2010. His third, “The Crisis of Zionism,” was published by Times Books in 2012.
Beinart has written for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, Newsweek, Slate, The Forward, Reader’s Digest, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Polity: the Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Studies Association. The Week magazine named him columnist of the year for 2004. In 2005, he gave the Theodore H. White lecture at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
He has appeared on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” “Charlie Rose,” “Meet the Press,” “The Colbert Report” and many other television programs.
Beinart graduated from Yale University, winning a Rhodes scholarship for graduate study at Oxford University. After graduating from University College, Oxford, Beinart became The New Republic’s managing editor in 1995. He became senior editor in 1997, and from 1999 to 2006 served as the magazine’s editor.
This episode of Race and Democracy was mixed and mastered by Oscar Kitmanyen.
Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President's Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy.
Mr. Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013), The Ethics of Influence (2015), #Republic (2017), Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide (2017), The Cost-Benefit Revolution (2018), On Freedom (2019), Conformity (2019), How Change Happens (2019), and Too Much Information (2020). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, "sludge" (defined to include paperwork and similar burdens), fake news, and freedom of speech.
This episode of Race and Democracy was mixed and mastered by Kaia Daniel and Sofia Salter.
Michael Eric Dyson is a renowned scholar, ordained Baptist minister, and public intellectual born in Detroit, Michigan. His innovative scholarship, combining cultural criticism and biography, focuses on race, religion, popular culture, and contemporary issues in the African American community. Dyson’s most recent book is April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Death and How It Changed America (2008).
He is also the author of Know What I Mean? (2007), a critical study of hip hop music, Debating Race (2007), a compilation of previously unpublished conversations with scholars, politicians and public commentators, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (2006), Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost its Mind (2006), Why I Love Black Women (2004), The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (2004), Open Mike (2002), I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (2001), and Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (1997). “Effortlessly and with conviction, [Dyson] weaves together a range of themes from gangsta rap to graduate seminars, deepening them with highly varied and vividly portrayed personal experience,” Noam Chomsky has said of Dyson. A two-time winner of the NAACP Image Award, Dyson has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, DePaul University, Chicago Theological Seminary, The University of North Carolina, and Columbia and Brown Universities. He is currently University Professor at Georgetown University.
Brett Hurt is the CEO and co-founder of data. world, a Public Benefit Corporation (and Certified B Corporation) focused on building the modern catalog for data and analysis as well as the world's largest collaborative public data catalog.
William Abranowicz has been a photographer for more than 40 years. His work is found in collections throughout the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Portrait Gallery in London, Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and The Smithsonian Institute.
His work has appeared in nearly every major publication in the United States, Europe, and Asia. He served as a contributing photographer to Condé Nast Traveler for 25 years, and has created campaigns American ExpressPlatinum Card, Rolex, Tiffany&Co., Ralph Lauren, Estée Lauder, Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Gold Peak, Eddie Bauer, Orvis, and Target.
Abranowicz assisted photographers Horst P. Horst and George Tice, becoming a master printer and working with the negatives of Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Michael Disfarmer, as well as Horst and Tice. He taught photography at Parsons School of Design and The New School, and was an artist-in-residence at Peters Valley in Layton, New Jersey.
He has published four monographs of his work and is the co-author of a dozen more. His newest book, American Originals, is being published by Vendome in Fall 2018.
Along with his son and daughter, Abranowicz is a licensed falconer. He is an avid environmentalist engaged in water, land, and climate issues nationally and locally. Abranowicz lives in Bedford, New York with his wife, Andrea Raisfeld, a location agent.
He is represented by Art + Commerce.
Charles L. Chavis, Jr. is Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution and History and Director of the John Mitchell, Jr. Program for History, Justice, and Race, at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University. Before joining the S-CAR, he served as the Museum Coordinator for the Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Chavis is a historian and museum educator whose work focuses on the history of racial violence and civil rights activism and Black and Jewish relations in the American South, and the ways in which the historical understandings of racial violence and civil rights activism can inform current and future approaches to peacebuilding and conflict resolution throughout the world. His areas of specialization includes Civil Rights oral history, historical consciousness, and racial violence and reconciliation.
He has received over twenty-five grants, awards and fellowships from organizations including, the Robert M. Bell Center for Civil Rights in Education, Knapp Family Foundation, American Jewish Archives, The National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Trust for Historic Preservation, National Park Service, and the American Historical Association.His current project, (In) Visible Stories: Salvaging Untold Histories of Marginalized Communities, is an intergenerational oral history curriculum project focusing on the personal meaning that is found within marginalized communities. The first phase of this project focuses on Baltimore, Maryland focusing on the intersections of history, memory, and identity in the life of Baltimore youth. The collaborators see the collective memory of racial violence, politics and civil rights, as being central to combating racism and inequality within the United States education system.
Charles Chavis has published more than twenty-five refereed articles, reference articles, essays, reviews, op-editorials, chapters and government reports and is author of the upcoming book, ‘Maryland, My Maryland’: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State (John Hopkins University, 2021) and editor of For the Sake of Peace: Africana Perspectives on Racism, Justice, and Peace in America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).
Ajanet Rountree is a doctoral scholar at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. She graduated with honors from the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a Masters's in the Anthropology of Peace and Human Rights. Much of her work seeks to uncover the hidden narratives of women, specifically Black women, within the fields of anthropology, human rights, justice, and peace with an understanding of their interconnections to globalization, social movements, and social change.
An internationally known cultural critic, journalist, activist, and thought leader in the area of hip-hop, youth culture, and Black political engagement, Bakari Kitwana is the Executive Director of Rap Sessions, which for the last fourteen years has conducted over 150 town hall meetings around the nation on difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop and millennial generations.
He is the collaborating writer for pioneering hip-hop artist Rakim's new book Sweat The Technique: Revelations on Creativity From The Lyrical Genius (Amistad, 2019) and the 2019-2020 Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at the W.E.B. Dubois Research Institute / Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. The former Editor-in-Chief of The Source magazine, where he wrote and edited hundreds of articles on hip-hop, youth culture, politics and national affairs, Kitwana co-founded the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention. The gathering brought over 4000 18-29 year-olds to Newark, NJ in 2004 to create and endorse a political agenda for the hip-hop generation.
Kitwana is the author of Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop and co-editor (with David Orr, Andrew Gumbel and William Becker) of the forthcoming Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government For the People (The New Press, 2020). His groundbreaking 2002 book The Hip-Hop Generation popularized the expression the hip-hop generation and has been adopted as a coursebook in classrooms at over 100 college and universities.
Kitwana has been Editorial Director of Third World Press, a senior media fellow at The Jamestown Project, Artist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Race Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, and has served on the organizing committee for the 2013 Black Youth Project convening that launched the millennial Black activist group BYP100.
Dr. Don Carleton is the founding director of The University of Texas at Austin's Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, which was organized in 1991. Prior to the creation of the Briscoe Center, he served from October 1975 through November 1979 as founding director of the Houston Metropolitan Research Center (HMRC), an urban history archives program sponsored by Rice University, the University of Houston, and the City of Houston. At HMRC, he established The Houston Review: A Journal of History and Culture of the Gulf Coast. From December 1979 until 1991 he served as the director of the University's Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center. A native of Dallas, Texas, Carleton earned his doctorate in U. S. history at the University of Houston.
Sudhir Hazareesingh FBA (18 October 1961) is a British-Mauritian historian. He has been a fellow and Tutor in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford since 1990. Most of his work relates to modern political history from 1850; including the history of contemporary France as well as Napoleon, the Republic and Charles de Gaulle.
Hazareesingh is the son of Kissoonsing Hazareesingh, a Cambridge- and Sorbonne-educated historian in his own right, who was a notable figure in Mauritian public life as a Mauritius Times writer and Principal Private Secretary to Seewoosagur Ramgoolam.
Hazareesingh's book Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September 2020. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize. Described in The Guardian as "a tour de force: by far the most complete, authoritative and persuasive biography of Toussaint that we are likely to have for a long time." Black Spartacus was BBC Radio 4's "Book of the Week" from 16 November 2020, read by Adrian Lester.
Ken Burns calls Jonathan Eig a "master storyteller." Joyce Carol Oates calls his book, Ali: A Life, “an epic of a biography.”
Eig is the author of five books, three of them New York Times best sellers. He was born in Brooklyn and graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
A former staff writer for The Wall Street Journal, Eig has also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker online, and The Washington Post. Prior to The Wall Street Journal, he worked as a feature writer for Chicago magazine and as a news reporter for The Dallas Morning News and The New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Dr. Maurice Hobson is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and Historian at Georgia State University. He earned the Ph.D. degree in History, focusing in African American History and 20th Century U.S. History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are grounded in the fields of African American history, 20th Century U.S. history, comparative labor, African American studies, oral history and ethnography, urban and rural history, political economy, and popular cultural studies. He is the author of award-winning book titled The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta with the University of North Carolina Press.
Dr. Hobson engages the social sciences and has created a new paradigm called the Black New South that explores the experiences of black folk in the American South, with national and international implications, since WWII. For this, he has served as an expert witness in court cases and as a voice of insight for public historical markers, monuments and museum exhibitions.
Lisa B. Thompson is professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of three books, Beyond The Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class(University of Illinois Press, 2009), Single Black Female (Samuel French Inc., 2012), and Underground, Monroe, and The Mamalogues: Three Plays (Northwestern University Press, 2020). Her scholarship focuses on issues of identity, representation, and performance in contemporary African American culture. Thompson’s award-winning plays, which have been produced off-Broadway, throughout the US, and internationally, explore African American history and culture through the lens of the middle class. Professor Thompson’s teaching has been recognized by the Texas Exes and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies. Her work has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies; Harvard University’sW. E. B. DuBois Research Institute; the University of Texas at Austin Humanities Institute; the Michele R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research; the University of California’s Office of the President; the Five Colleges; Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity; Hedgebrook; the Millay Colony for the Arts; and MacDowell.
Paul Stekler is a nationally recognized documentary filmmaker whose critically praised and award-winning work includes George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire; Last Man Standing: Politics, Texas Style; Vote for Me: Politics in America, a four-hour PBS special about grassroots electoral politics; two segments of the Eyes on the Prize II series on the history of civil rights; Last Stand at Little Big Horn (broadcast as part of PBS's series The American Experience); Louisiana Boys: Raised on Politics (broadcast on PBS's P.O.V. series); Getting Back to Abnormal (which aired on P.O.V. in 2014); and 2016’s Postcards from the Great Divide, a web series about politics for The Washington Post and PBS Digital. Overall, his films have won two George Foster Peabody Awards, three Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Awards, three national Emmy Awards, and a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Dr. Stekler, who was RTF Chair from 2010 to 2017, has a doctorate in Government from Harvard University, where his work focused on Southern politics. He previously was a political pollster in Louisiana, while teaching at Tulane, and was the founder of Center for Politics and Governance at UT’s LBJ School of Public Affairs. His writing, on subjects like Hollywood blockbuster films, the greatest Texas documentaries, American politics and politics as depicted in documentary films has appeared in the Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, the International Documentary Association’s magazine, among other places, and in the book, “Killing Custer," co-written with the late Native American novelist James Welch. Stekler was named film school Mentor of the Year in 2014 by Variety Magazine.
Keisha N. Blain is an American historian and writer. She is an Associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and President of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). She is "one of the most innovative and influential young historians of her generation." Blain is one of the nation's leading scholars of African American history, African Diaspora Studies, and Women's and Gender History.
Upon completing her postdoctoral research in 2015, Blain accepted a faculty position at the University of Iowa for two years. While there, she received an American Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She also received a two year Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement Fellowship at Duke University during the summer. In 2017, Blain accepted a faculty position at the University of Pittsburgh's Department of history. She co-edited Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence with Chad Williams and Kidada Williams in 2016. She became senior editor of Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society in 2016. In 2017, Blain was awarded the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History from the American Historical Association (AHA).
Sukyi manages the Square One Project’s Roundtable on the Future of Justice Policy, and draws together academics, advocates, community leaders, and practitioners in three-day convenings to drive understanding and innovation in criminal justice reform.
Sukyi hails from Austin, Texas, where she serves as the Board Chair at Austin Justice Coalition, a black-led grassroots organization focused on local and statewide criminal justice reform, educational justice, community empowerment, and civic engagement. She also sits on the board of Turkey City Writers Workshop, whose mission is to champion writers of color in the speculative fiction genre through sponsorship and mentorship at writing workshops.
Most recently, she worked as the Policy Coordinator at Just Liberty, a bi-partisan 501(c)(4) dedicated to comprehensive criminal justice reform in Texas. At Just Liberty, she helped to build, manage, and engage a list of tens of thousands of criminal justice reformers across Texas. Sukyi also an appointed member of the City of Austin’s Human Rights Commission.
Her formal education includes a B.A. and M.A. in Literature from Texas Tech University and Texas State University-San Marcos, respectively.
Ron Kirk is Senior Of Counsel in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Dallas and Washington, D.C. offices. He is Co-Chair of the International Trade Practice Group and a member of the Sports Law, Public Policy, Crisis Management, and Private Equity Practice Groups.
Ambassador Kirk focuses on providing strategic advice to companies with global interests. Prior to joining the firm in April 2013, Ambassador Kirk served as the 16th United States Trade Representative (USTR) and was a member of President Obama’s Cabinet, serving as the President’s principal trade advisor, negotiator, and spokesperson on trade issues.
Ambassador Kirk was nominated to be United States Trade Representative by President Barack Obama and was confirmed by the United States Senate in 2009. The office of USTR is responsible for the development and oversight of U.S. trade policy, including strategy, negotiation, implementation and enforcement of multilateral, regional/bilateral and sector-specific trade agreements. Ambassador Kirk successfully negotiated the conclusion and Congressional passage of trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and Korea, and Russian’s entry in the World Trade Organization. He was also responsible for U.S. trade policy involving agriculture; industry; services and investment; intellectual property; environment; labor; development and preference programs.
Ambassador Kirk draws upon more than 30 years of diverse legislative and economic experience on local, state, and federal levels. As the first African American Mayor of Dallas from 1995 – 2001, he earned a reputation for bringing together diverse coalitions to get things done. During his tenure as Mayor, Ambassador Kirk expanded Dallas’ reach to the world through a range of trade programs, including numerous trade missions. He also passed seven budgets that focused on the critical needs of the city while maintaining and even lowering taxes. His economic development efforts helped secure more than 45,000 jobs and investment of more than $3.5 billion in Dallas. To protect citizens he increased the public safety budget by $128 million, and while he was Mayor, Dallas saw its lowest crime rate in 20 years. Previously, Governor Ann Richards appointed him as Texas Secretary of State, he served as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen and he was named as chair of Texas’ General Service Commission. Ambassador Kirk also served as a City of Dallas assistant city attorney.
Mark K. Updegrove is the president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. From 2009 to 2017, he was the director of the LBJ Presidential Library where, he hosted the Civil Rights Summit in 2014, which included Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter, and oversaw a major renovation of the Library’s core museum exhibits. Earlier in his career, he served as the publisher of Newsweek and president of Time magazine's Canadian edition.
Updegrove is the author of four books on the presidency including The Last Republicans: Inside the Extraordinary Relationship Between George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency. As Presidential Historian for ABC News, he appears regularly on Good Morning America, and This Week, and has written for The New York Times, The Hill, Politico, The Daily Beast, Time, Parade, and National Geographic. He has conducted exclusive interviews with five U.S. presidents.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is a scholar who speaks to the black and blue in America. His most well-known books, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, and In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, take a wide look at black communities and reveal complexities, vulnerabilities, and opportunities for hope. Hope that is, in one of his favorite quotes from W.E.B Du Bois, “not hopeless, but a bit unhopeful.” Other muses include James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. In addition to his readings of early American philosophers and contemporary political scientists, Glaude turns to African American literature in his writing and teaching for insight into African American political life, religious thought, gender, and class.
He is chair of the Department of African American Studies, a program he first became involved with shaping as a doctoral candidate in Religion at Princeton. He is the current president of the American Academy of Religion. His books on religion and philosophy include African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction and Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America, which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Book Prize. Glaude is also the author of two edited volumes, and many influential articles about religion for academic journals. He has also written for the likes of The New York Times and The Huffington Post.
Sonya Douglass Horsford currently serves as Associate Professor of Education Leadership in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on the politics of race in education leadership, policy, and reform. She is the Founding Director of the Black Education Research Collective (BERC) and Co-Director of the Urban Education Leaders Program (UELP) at Teachers College – an Ed.D. program for aspiring urban district leaders.
Prior to joining Teachers College, Sonya served on the education leadership faculty at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her latest book, The Politics of Education Policy in an Era of Inequality: Possibilities for Democratic Schooling with Janelle T. Scott and Gary L. Anderson offers a critical analysis of education policy amid widening social inequality, ideological polarization, and the dismantling of public institutions in the U.S.A.
She is an active member of Divisions A and L of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) and currently serves as Chair of the Leadership for Social Justice SIG and Politics of Education SIG.
Rebecca Campbell has served as chief executive of the Austin Film Society since 1998. Prior to joining AFS, she spent 12 years in the nonprofit sector, serving as Executive Director of two statewide California organizations, following which she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Video and Film Production from the University of Texas at Austin.
During her tenure, the Film Society has created and developed Austin Studios (a 20-acre film and creative media production facility), founded the Texas Film Hall of Fame (which has raised over $1.8 million for grants to Texas artists), built a home for its nationally recognized exhibition program at the AFS Cinema, and launched Austin Public, where Austin’s diverse mediamakers train and collaborate.
Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He earned both a Ph.D. and also a Master of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgia Institute of Technology where he majored in History, Technology, and Society.
Laurence has published articles on these topics in various venues. In 2014 Laurence’s first book, Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago, was published by the University of Chicago Press. This book grapples with the consequences of the “war on drugs” together with mass incarceration, the ramifications of heroin trafficking for HIV-infected teenagers, the perils of gunshot violence, and the ensuing disabilities that gang members suffer. Investigating this encompassing context allows him to detail the social forces that make black urban residents vulnerable to disease and disability. Renegade Dreams received the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) in 2015.
Laurence’s latest book, Torture Trees: Police Violence from Chicago to the War on Terror, explores a decades-long scandal in which 125 were tortured while in police custody. Torture Trees will also be published by the University of Chicago Press.
A prominent leader in the national movement to build positive, inclusive, and inspiring humanist communities, Greg M. Epstein has served the country’s rapidly growing population of non-religious people for nearly two decades. Described as a “godfather to the [humanist] movement” by The New York Times Magazine in recognition of his efforts, Epstein was also named “one of the top faith and moral leaders in the United States” by Faithful Internet, a project coordinated by the United Church of Christ with assistance from the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.
Since 2005, Greg has served as the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University. He has also served, since 2018, as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Office of Religious Life as Humanist Chaplain at MIT and Convener for Ethical Life. He also currently serves as ethicist in residence and columnist for TechCrunch, a leading publication chronicling the tech industry.
Greg has also served in an advisory capacity for a diverse range of interfaith and humanist institutions, including Boston Mayor Martin Walsh’s Interfaith Advisory Task Force and the Advisory Board of the Secular Student Alliance. He also supported “The Inclusive America Project,” an initiative of the Aspen Institute co-chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. From 2008-2014, he served on the Executive Committee of the Harvard Chaplains, with a term as vice president.
Greg is a frequently-quoted expert on humanism, religion and ethics. Greg authored the New York Times bestselling book, “Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe.” His writing has appeared on CNN, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Salon, Cognoscenti and WBUR. His work has also been widely discussed in the national and international media, including the New York Times, CNN, Boston Globe, and on dozens of radio and television programs.
Mark Whitaker spent three decades as a reporter, writer, and editor for Newsweek Magazine and in 1999 became the first African-American to lead a national newsweekly. In 2007, he joined NBC News and the following year replaced the late Tim Russert as Washington Bureau Chief. In 2011, Mark was appointed Managing Editor of CNN Worldwide, overseeing day-to-day news coverage across all television and digital platforms as well as the original programming team that created CNN Films and acquired Anthony Bourdain’s "Parts Unknown."
In 2011, Mark published "My Long Trip Home," the story of his turbulent upbringing in a broken interracial home. Widely acclaimed, the memoir was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Mark’s latest book, "Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance,” chronicles the remarkable cultural and political legacy of black Pittsburgh, where Mark’s father grew up and his grandparents ran funeral homes. Barnes & Noble selected "Smoketown" as a featured book for Black History Month 2018, and—in a starred review—Kirkus Reviews hailed it as "an expansive, prodigiously researched, and masterfully told history."
Van Lathan is an established host and media personality from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He can be heard weekly on "The Red Pill" podcast, which garners over 50,000 listeners per episode, as well as on the podcast Higher Learning with Rachel Lindsay. Van's passion for sports, entertainment, and news comes across in his reporting and insightful interviews. At present, Van resides in Los Angeles and is developing both film and television projects.
Join Peniel and Van in their discussion of black representation in American pop culture on this week's episode of Race and Democracy.
Julian Zelizer is a professor in political history at Princeton University, frequent political commentator, and author of over 900 op-eds and books covering American political history. After obtaining his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, Zelizer went on to write for The Atlantic and work as a weekly columnist at CNN. He has twice won the D.B Hardeman Prize. Among the 19 books he has authored and edited is Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 - a book which received widespread praise from critics. His most recent book, published in July 2020, is entitled Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.
Trymaine Lee is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy award-winning journalist. Having reported for both The New York Times and Huffington Post, Trymaine currently works as a national reporter for the digital arm of MSNBC. He has been recognized for his work covering social justice issues, including the case of Trayvon Martin in 2012, for which he won the April Sidney Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation. He is the founder and host of Into America podcast, a show discussing politics and how policy impacts the lives of everyday Americans.
Dr. Eric Cervini is an award-winning historian of LGBTQ+ politics and culture. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar.
As an authority on 1960s gay activism, Cervini serves on the Board of Directors of the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus and on the Board of Advisors of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of gay American history. His award-winning digital exhibitions have been featured in Harvard’s Rudenstine Gallery, and he has presented his research to audiences across America and the United Kingdom.
He lives in Los Angeles with his two plants, Coco Montrese and Fig O’Hara.
Dr. Karma Chávez is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. Her scholarship is informed by queer of color theory and women of color feminism and analyzes social movement building, activist rhetoric, and coalitional politics. Dr. Chávez’s research explores the rhetorical practices and coalitions of marginalized groups within existing power structures. She also examines rhetoric produced by powerful institutions and actors about marginalized peoples and the systems that oppress them, such as the immigration system and prisons.
Dr. Chávez’s current co-authored project, After Ferguson: Black, Queer, Feminist Experiments Against Police and Jails, examines community-university collaborations in Madison, Wisconsin. Her previous book Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, published in 2013, examined coalition building at the many intersections of queer and immigration politics in the contemporary United States. She has also published two co-edited volumes Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method and Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies.
Karma R. Chávez is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and affiliate in the Department of Communication Studies, the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, the Center for Mexican American Studies, the LGBTQ Studies Program, and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas - Austin. She is co-editor of Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method, Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, and author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities. Karma is also a member of the radical queer collective Against Equality.
Robert Martin Seda-Schreiber is a chief activist of the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice. Robert forged New Jersey's first middle school gay-straight alliance, was honored as New Jersey's State Champion of Equality, served as a Fulbright Memorial Fund Scholar to Japan, received two Senate proclamations recognizing his service to the community, and was named the NEA's "Social Justice Activist of the Year."
Before teaching, he founded and ran the Creatures of Awareness Theatre Co., a non-profit community theatre group which raised over $10,000 for AIDS foundations and support groups. As a published and internationally-recognized visual artist, he has continues to create many works of art, the vast majority of which were in the form of donations for various causes and organizations.
Named for a Kennedy and a King, Robert marched on D.C. in the womb and has since followed the path each and every day of his life. His boots have always been on the ground, both literally and figuratively.
James G. Basker is President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and The Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History at Barnard College, Columbia University. Educated at Harvard College, Cambridge University, and (as a Rhodes Scholar) at Oxford University, Basker taught at Harvard for seven years before coming to Barnard. His scholarly work spans the fields of history and literature, focusing especially on the 18th century and the history of slavery and abolition. His most recent books are American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation (2012), The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett (2012), Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery 1660-1810 (2002), Early American Abolitionists: A Collection of Anti-Slavery Writings 1760-1820 (2005), and Slavery in the Founding Era: Literary Contexts (2005).
As President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute since 1997, Basker has overseen the development of history education initiatives nationwide, including history high schools, teacher seminars, traveling exhibitions, publication series, scholarly fellowships, research centers, book awards, and national history teacher of the year. Professor Basker is also the founder and President of OxBridge Academic Programs, which sponsors academic summer programs and teacher seminars in Europe and New York.
Mark Atwood Lawrence is Associate Professor of History, Distinguished Fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, and Director of Graduate Studies at the Clements Center for National Security at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.A. from Stanford University in 1988 and his doctorate from Yale in 1999. After teaching as a lecturer in history at Yale, Mark joined the History Department at UT Austin in 2000. Since then, he has published two books, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005) and The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is one of the leading intellectual voices in the country. He is currently the host of BET News and a political contributor for CNN. An award-winning journalist, Dr. Hill has received numerous prestigious awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, GLAAD, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Dr. Hill is the Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions at Temple University. Prior to that, he held positions at Columbia University and Morehouse College. Since his days as a youth in Philadelphia, Dr. Hill has been a social justice activist and organizer. He is a founding board member of My5th, a non-profit organization devoted to educating youth about their legal rights and responsibilities. He is also a board member and organizer of the Philadelphia Student Union. Dr. Hill also works closely with the ACLU Drug Reform Project, focusing on drug informant policy. Over the past few years, he has actively worked on campaigns to end the death penalty and to release numerous political prisoners.
Michael Eric Dyson is a renowned scholar, ordained Baptist minister, and public intellectual born in Detroit, Michigan. His innovative scholarship, combining cultural criticism and biography, focuses on race, religion, popular culture, and contemporary issues in the African American community. Dyson’s most recent book is April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Death and How It Changed America (2008).
He is also the author of Know What I Mean? (2007), a critical study of hip hop music, Debating Race (2007), a compilation of previously unpublished conversations with scholars, politicians and public commentators, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (2006), Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost its Mind (2006), Why I Love Black Women (2004), The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (2004), Open Mike (2002), I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (2001), and Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (1997). “Effortlessly and with conviction, [Dyson] weaves together a range of themes from gangsta rap to graduate seminars, deepening them with highly varied and vividly portrayed personal experience,” Noam Chomsky has said of Dyson. A two-time winner of the NAACP Image Award, Dyson has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, DePaul University, Chicago Theological Seminary, The University of North Carolina, and Columbia and Brown Universities. He is currently University Professor at Georgetown University.
Brencia Berry is a San Antonio native who recently served on the Sen. Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential campaign as the Deputy Director of Public Engagement as well as the National Deputy Advance Director. During her time on the campaign trail she had the opportunity to work as a national advance associate for Secretary Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama, and Vice President Joe Biden. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Political Science with a minor in Business Administration from Louisiana State University (LSU). She earned her Masters Degree at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs. During her time at UT, she served as the Co-Chair of the Public Affairs Alliance for Communities of Color, and with the Diversity and Inclusion Committee. She is passionate about social justice issues like mass criminal justice reform, education, and workforce development.
Named as one of the "100 Most Connected Men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known and controversial commentators on the digital revolution. He has written five books including the best-selling Cult of the Amateur, The Internet Is Not The Answer and How To Fix The Future. He directed and wrote the 2020 movie “How To Fix Democracy” and is the host of the popular podcast show "Keen On Capitalism.”
Dr. Cherise Smith is a professor of art history specializing in American art after 1945, especially as it intersects with the politics of identity, race, and gender. She is the Chair of the Department of African & African Diaspora Studies and is the founding Executive Director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies, which consist of the Christian-Green Gallery and IdeaLab. Cherise previously directed the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies and co-directed the Op-Ed Project. Her recent book, Michael Ray Charles: A Retrospective (University of Texas Press, 2020), surveys Charles’ career, exploring the artist’s “sampling” approach to provocative anti-black stereotypes, as well as his analysis of African American masculinity and sports culture.
K. Sabeel Rahman is the President of Demos, a dynamic think-and-do tank that powers the movement for a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy. Through cutting-edge policy research, inspiring litigation, and deep relationships with grassroots organizations, Demos champions solutions that will create a democracy and economy rooted in racial equity.
Rahman is also an Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, where he teaches constitutional law, administrative law, and courses on law and inequality. He is the author of Democracy Against Domination (Oxford University Press, 2017), which won the Dahl Prize for scholarship on the subject of democracy. His academic work explores the history, values, and policy strategies that animate efforts to make our society more inclusive and democratic, and our economy more equitable. His new book, Civic Power, looks at how to build a more inclusive and empowered bottom-up democracy.
Michele Deitch holds a joint appointment as a senior lecturer at the LBJ School and the Law School, and is an attorney with over 30 years of experience working on criminal justice and juvenile justice policy issues with state and local government officials, corrections administrators, judges and advocates. She specializes in independent oversight of correctional institutions, prison and jail conditions, managing youth in custody and juveniles in the adult criminal justice system. Deitch co-chairs the American Bar Association's Subcommittee on Correctional Oversight, and helped draft the ABA's Standards on the Treatment of Prisoners. Her numerous articles about correctional oversight include a 50-state inventory of prison oversight models and many reports on juvenile justice that have received national attention. Her TEDx talk, "Why are we trying kids as adults?" was named a TEDx Editor's Pick in January 2015.
Gordon Abner is a public management scholar whose research focuses on improving citizens’ perceptions of public employees and government service, and on improving the morale and performance of public employees — which he is particularly interested in within the sphere of social policy. Professor Abner has employed a variety of methods in his research including experiments, content analysis, interviews, and survey research, and he enjoys learning new methods that may be applicable to his work. His research has appeared in Nonprofit Management and Leadership as well as in the Review of Public Personnel Administration.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or co-authored twenty-one books and created fifteen documentary films, including Wonders of the African World, African American Lives, Faces of America, Black in Latin America, and Finding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy series now in its third season on PBS. His six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013), which he wrote, executive produced, and hosted, earned the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program—Long Form, as well as the Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and NAACP Image Award. Having written for such leading publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time, Professor Gates now serves as chairman of TheRoot.com, a daily online magazine he co-founded in 2008, while overseeing the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field. He has also received grant funding to develop a Finding Your Roots curriculum to teach students science through genetics and genealogy. In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, a collection of his writings edited by Abby Wolf, was published. His next film is the four-hour documentary series, And Still I Rise: Black America since MLK, airing on PBS in April 2016; a companion book, which he co-authored with Kevin M. Burke, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2015.
Sherrilyn Ifill is the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. LDF was founded in 1940 by legendary civil rights lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall, and became a separate organization from the NAACP in 1957. The lawyers at the Legal Defense Fund developed and executed the legal strategy that led to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, widely regarded as the most transformative and monumental legal decision of the 20th century. Ifill is the second woman to lead the organization.
Edwin Dorn teaches defense policy and courses about the relationship between race and immigration policy. He was dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs from 1997 to 2005. Prior to that, Dr. Dorn spent 20 years in Washington, DC. He worked on civil rights and education policy in the Carter administration and served as undersecretary of defense (Personnel & Readiness) in the Clinton administration. During the 1980s, he was affiliated with two Washington think tanks: the Joint Center for Political Studies and the Brookings Institution. A native Texan, he graduated from The University of Texas at Austin (Phi Beta Kappa). After serving as an officer in the U.S. Army, he completed his Ph.D. at Yale University. Dr. Dorn’s major publications include “Rules and Racial Equality” (Yale University Press) and “Who Defends America?” which he edited (Joint Center for Political Studies Press). He was an adviser to the PBS documentary “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years.” He is chairman of the board of the Kettering Foundation and serves on the boards of the Institute for Defense Analyses and the Seton Family of Hospitals. He also participates in the Dartmouth Conferences, an ongoing series of “back channel” meetings between prominent citizens of the United States and Russia.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an Associate Professor at Indiana University.
Khalil’s scholarship examines the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality, and criminal justice in modern U.S. history. He is co-editor of “Constructing the Carceral State,” a special issue of the Journal of American History (June 2015), and a contributor to a 2014 National Research Council study, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, as well as the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard), which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book award in American Studies.
Khalil is an award-winning teacher at Harvard and has received numerous honors for his commitment to public engagement, including BPI Chicago’s Champion of the Public Interest Award (2018), The Fortune Society’s Game Changer Award (2017), Ebony Power 100 (2013), The Root 100 of Black Influencers (2012-2014), and Crain’s New York Business magazine 40 under 40 (2011).
Kevin Cokley, Ph.D. is a Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Educational Psychology, as well as a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas-Austin. Dr. Cokley’s research and teaching can be broadly categorized in the area of African American psychology. His research interests include the construction of racial and ethnic identities, Afrocentric psychology, academic motivation, academic self-concept, and understanding the psychological and environmental factors that impact African American student achievement. Dr. Cokley has published over 50 articles and book chapters. His 2004 article published in the Harvard Educational Review challenges the notion that African American students are anti-intellectual. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Black Psychology, and has served on the editorial boards of several journals including the Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology journal and the Journal of Counseling Psychology. He is the recipient of the 2008 “10 Rising Stars of the Academy” award by Diverse Issues in Higher Education, the 2007 Association of Black Psychologists’ Scholarship Award, and the 2004 co-recipient of the Emerging Professional Award given by the Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues of the American Psychological Association.
Ed Pavlić (Ph.D. Indiana University) is the Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies. Affiliated faculty in Creative Writing, author of eight collections of poetry, two critical studies, and a novel, he twice served as Director of the Creative Writing Ph.D. Program in English (2006-2011, 2015-2017). His most recent books are Another Kind of Madness (Milkweed Editions, 2019), a novel set mostly in Chicago and coastal Kenya and tuned to the sound of soul in music, especially in the songs of Chaka Khan; Live at the Bitter End (Saturnalia Books, 2018); Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno (National Poetry Series, Fence Books, 2015) and 'Who Can Afford to Improvise?': James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (Fordham University Press, 2015). Other recent works are Visiting Hours at the Color Line (National Poetry Series, Milkweed Editions, 2013), But Here Are Small Clear Refractions (Achebe Center, 2009, Kwani? Trust, 2013) and Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (U Georgia P, 2008). His other books are Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (APR-Honickman/Copper Canyon, 2001), Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture (U Minnesota Press, 2002), and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE/Sheep Meadow Press, 2006).
Forthcoming books include: Let It Be Broke (Four Way Books, 2020), a collection of poems focused upon cross-racial dynamics in American life. Among his current projects are: a non-fiction work, “No Time to Rest: James Baldwin’s Life in Letters to His Brother David"; "'Outward in Larger Terms': The Radical Geography of Adrienne Rich's Expanding Solitudes," a study of the poet's career; and "Like I Was Ink," a memoir exploring the intimate tangle of race and identity in the American experience.
Keffrelyn D. Brown (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a Professor of Cultural Studies in Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. She holds a faculty appointment in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies and the Center for Women and Gender Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on the sociocultural knowledge of race in teaching and curriculum, critical multicultural teacher education and the educational discourses and intellectual thought related to African Americans and their educational experiences in the U.S.
Keffrelyn has published over 40 books, journal articles, book chapters and other educational texts. She serves on the editorial boards for several well-recognized peer-reviewed journals including Teachers College Record, Race, Ethnicity and Education, Teaching and Teacher Education and Urban Education. Her most recent book, After the "At-Risk" Label: Reorienting Risk in Educational Policy and Practice was published by Teachers College Press. Keffrelyn has received recognition for both her research and teaching. In 2017 she received the Division K Mid-career Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). In 2013 she was awarded the Kappa Delta Pi/Division K Early Career Research Award from AERA. She is also the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and the Wisconsin-Spencer Foundation Research Training Grant. In 2012 she received the Regent's Outstanding Teaching award, the highest teaching honor given for excellence in undergraduate teaching across the University of Texas system. She was inducted in the Provost's Teaching Fellows program at UT-Austin in 2017.
Keffrelyn is a sought after presenter in her local, regional and national communities. She is active in the multiple roles she has as a researcher, teacher, teacher educator and critically engaged community member. As a former elementary and middle school teacher, school administrator, and curriculum developer, Keffrelyn is keen to the everyday challenges of schooling. She continually seeks to produce scholarship that is theoretically robust, empirically rich and both responsive and relevant to practice in teaching, curriculum and teacher education.
Dr. Ricky Jones is a Professor and the Graduate Director & Chair in the Pan-African Studies Department at the University of Louisville. His research focuses on African American Politics and Leadership, Political Theory, African American Nationalism, Violence and Resistance, and the African American Male.
Professor Musgrove teaches courses in Post-WWII United States History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County with an emphasis on African American politics. He is the author of Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics: How the Harassment of Black Elected Officials Shaped Post-Civil Rights America (U. of Georgia, 2012) and co-author, with Chris Myers Asch, of Chocolate City, A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (UNC, 2017). He is currently working on a web-based map of the black power movement in Washington, D.C., and beginning a book project tentatively titled “We must take to the streets again”: The Black Power Resurgence, 1982-97. Professor Musgrove earned his Ph.D. from New York University in 2005. He lives with his wife and two sons in Washington, D.C.
Chloe Latham Sikes is a doctoral student in the Educational Policy & Planning program in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Grinnell College and an M.A. in Curriculum & Instruction from UT-Austin. Her research interests include the intersections of immigration and educational policy, school finance, school-university-community partnerships, policy implementation, and critical policy analysis.
Before returning to graduate school, Chloe worked for four years in college access and university admissions. During her graduate school experience, she has also served with advocacy organizations in Central Texas during the 2015 and 2017 state legislative sessions and has interned with multiple social and educational policy organizations. Chloe hopes to bring critical research into practice through policy work in academic, political, and community spaces.
Michael Ezra is professor of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University. He is the author of the book Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon (2009) and editor of the books Civil Rights Movement: People and Perspectives (2009) and The Economic Civil Rights Movement: African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power. Ezra is also the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed Journal of Civil and Human Rights and the co-editor, with Carlo Rotella, of the book The Bittersweet Science (2017), which was named one of the best sports books of the year by the Boston Globe. Professor Ezra teaches courses in recent African American history and culture.
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie is a University Distinguished Professor of History and Associate Dean in the Graduate School. His research and teaching interests comprise a range of time periods, themes, and topical specialties, including black intellectual history, the history of the black historical enterprise, black women’s history, black life during “the nadir,” the civil rights-Black Power movement, African American Studies, hip hop culture, and contemporary black history.
His books include Black History: “Old School” Black Historians and the Hip Hop Generation (Bedford Publishers, Inc., 2006), The Early Black History Movement, Carter G. Woodson, and Lorenzo Johnston Greene (University of Illinois Press, 2007), African American History Reconsidered (University of Illinois Press, 2010), Carter G. Woodson in Washington, D.C.: The Father of Black History (The History Press, 2014), What is African American History? (Polity Press: Cambridge, UK, 2015), and Reclaiming the Black Past: The Use and Misuse of African American History in the Twenty-First Century (Verso Books, 2018). He is the next Editor of The Journal of African American History.
Ashley D. Farmer is a historian of black women's history, intellectual history, and radical politics. Her book, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (UNC Press, 2017), is the first comprehensive study of black women's intellectual production and activism in the Black Power era. She is also the co-editor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (NUP Press, 2018), an anthology that examines four central themes within the black intellectual tradition: black internationalism, religion, and spirituality, racial politics and struggles for social justice, and black radicalism.
Daron K. Roberts is a Harvard Law grad turned NFL coach. Currently, he is a university lecturer and founding director of the Center for Sports Leadership & Innovation at the University of Texas. He also serves as a lecturer in the Plan II Honors program where he teaches courses on sports leadership and innovation. His writings have appeared in the Houston Chronicle and Huffington Post as well as Forbes and Fortune. He has served as a guest analyst for ESPN's Longhorn Network. Previously, Roberts worked as a defensive quality control assistant for the Cleveland Browns.
Liliana M. Garces is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an Affiliate Faculty at the University of Texas School of Law. She teaches courses on higher education law, equity and diversity in higher education, and race, law, and education. Her research is grounded in the intersection of law and educational policy, with a focus on access, diversity, and equity in higher education, and the use and influence of social science research in law. Her work employs quantitative, qualitative, and legal research methods and draws from frameworks across multiple fields and disciplines to tackle the complex nature of racial and ethnic inequality in K-12 and higher education. Her research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the W.E. Upjohn Institute.
Dr. Garces's scholarship has been published in a variety of top peer-reviewed education journals, including Educational Researcher, American Educational Research Journal, American Journal of Education, Journal of Higher Education, Educational Policy, Peabody Journal of Education, The Review of Higher Education, and Urban Review, as well as law journals, policy reports, and books. She is co-editor of Affirmative Action and Racial Equity: Considering the Fisher Case to Forge the Path Ahead (Routledge, 2015) and School Integration Matters: Research-Based Strategies to Advance Racial Equity (Teachers College Press, 2016). She serves as Associate Editor for The Journal of Higher Education and is on the editorial boards for Educational Researcher, The Review of Higher Education, and AERA Open. She is an active member of national organizations focused on education issues.
Prior appointments before the University of Texas at Austin include: Associate Professor at The Pennsylvania State University, where she co-directed and co-founded the Center for Education and Civil Rights; Assistant Professor at The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development; and Post-Doctorate Fellow at the University of Michigan's National Poverty Center in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Prior to becoming faculty, she worked as a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the Legal Aid Society in DC, and as a judicial law clerk in federal district court. Dr. Garces holds a doctorate in education from Harvard University, a juris doctor from the University of Southern California School of Law, and a bachelor of arts from Brown University.
Jade Vásquez and Cassie Knaff are CSRD Graduate Fellows for the 2018-2019 academic year. Jade is a graduate student at the UT LBJ School of Public Affairs and is pursuing a Master’s in Global Policy Studies. Cassie Knaff is a doctoral candidate in UT’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and studies race, language socialization, and citizenship.
Edmund T. Gordon is the founding (former) chair of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology of the African Diaspora, and Vice Provost for Diversity at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Gordon is also the former Associate Vice President of Thematic Initiatives and Community Engagement of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement as well as former Director of the Center for African and African American Studies at The University of Texas. His teaching and research interests include: Culture and power in the African Diaspora, gender studies (particularly Black males), critical race theory, race education, and the racial economy of space and resources. His publications include Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African-Nicaraguan Community, 1998 UT Press. Dr. Gordon received his Doctorate in Social Anthropology from Stanford University and his Master's of Arts from Stanford University in Anthropology and Master's degree in Marine Sciences from the University of Miami.
Dr. Tracie Lowe is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis.
Olufemi Vaughan is a Nigerian academic whose research and teaching focuses on African political and social history, African Politics, Diaspora Studies, African Migrations and Globalization, Religion and African States. He is currently the Alfred Sargent Lee '41 and Mary Ames Lee Professor of African Studies at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Victoria DeFrancesco Soto is a lecturer at The University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs, where she was selected as one of UT’s Game Changers. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Mexican-American and Latino Studies and the Center for Mexican American Studies. Soto received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University, during which time she was a National Science Foundation Fellow. Named one of the top 12 scholars in the country by Diverse magazine, she previously taught at Northwestern University and Rutgers.
In her research and teaching, DeFrancesco Soto brings an interdisciplinary lens to the understanding of American politics and policy. Her areas of expertise include immigration, women and politics, political psychology, and campaigns and elections.
DeFrancesco Soto is a contributor to MSNBC and NBCNews.com, as well as a regular political analyst for Telemundo. She has provided on-air analysis for CNN, Fox, PBS, Univision and NPR, and has appeared on HBO’s "Real Time with Bill Maher." Most recently, she was a featured expert in the PBS documentary "Willie Velasquez: Your Vote is Your Voice," about the civil rights trailblazer. DeFrancesco Soto also has been published in both academic and popular outlets such as POLITICO, Talking Points Memo and Perspectives on Politics, where she has translated social science research into a more relatable form of information for a wide variety of audiences.
Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He earned both a PhD and also a Master of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgia Institute of Technology where he majored in History, Technology and Society.
Laurence has published articles on these topics in various venues. In 2014 Laurence’s first book, Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago, was published by the University of Chicago Press. This book grapples with the consequences of the “war on drugs” together with mass incarceration, the ramifications of heroin trafficking for HIV infected teenagers, the perils of gunshot violence and the ensuing disabilities that gang members suffer. Investigating this encompassing context allows him to detail the social forces that make black urban residents vulnerable to disease and disability. Renegade Dreams received the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) in 2015.
Laurence’s latest book, Torture Trees: Police Violence from Chicago to the War on Terror, explores a decades long scandal in which 125 were tortured while in police custody. Torture Trees will also be published by the University of Chicago Press.
Dr. Joseph sits down in the studio with Dr. Sugrue to discuss the changing political futures of American cities and how that intersects with race and civil rights.
Dr. Joseph sits down with Dr. Brandon Jones, Associate Director for Student Learning and Development, to discuss Black men in higher education and student-athletes’ exploitation and achievement.
Peniel talks with Jeremi Suri on his book, "The Impossible Presidency", and how America's highest office has changed in perception and power throughout history.
Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the university's Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Professor Suri is the author and editor of nine books on contemporary politics and foreign policy. His most recent book is "The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office." His other books include "Henry Kissinger and the American Century," "Liberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama," and "Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy" (with Robert Hutchings). Professor Suri writes for major newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, The Dallas Morning News, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Foreign Affairs, Fortune, The American Prospect, and Wired. He also writes for various online sites and blogs. He is a popular public lecturer, appears frequently on radio and television programs, and hosts a weekly political podcast, "This is Democracy".
Professor Suri teaches courses on strategy and decision-making, leadership, globalization, international relations and modern history. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, and he teaches and serves as academic director for the Executive Master in Public Leadership program (EMPL) at the LBJ School. His research and teaching have received numerous prizes. In 2007 Smithsonian magazine named him one of America's "Top Young Innovators" in the arts and sciences.
Dr. Brandon Terry sits down in Dr. Peniel Joseph's office to discuss the political philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Brandon M. Terry is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard University. He earned a PhD with university distinction in Political Science and African American Studies from Yale University, where he was also a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow and a recipient of the Sterling Prize, in 2012. Prior to Yale, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with an AB in Government and African and African American Studies and received an MSc in Political Theory Research as a Michael von Clemm Fellow at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford.
His current research project sits at the intersection of political theory, history, and African-American Studies. Tentatively titled, The Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement, it is a reconstruction of the philosophical foundations of historiographical debates concerning the African-American civil rights movement, and an attempt, through a synthesis of methods drawn from political theory, philosophy of history, literary theory, and African-American Studies, to articulate the normative significance of these historical narratives, given the widespread invocation of the example of the civil rights movement in contemporary political theory and public philosophy. In pursuing these questions, it also hopes to contribute to a broader debate in political theory about its relationships with historiography and historical imagination. An essay from this project recently won the Best Paper award from the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association and the Alex Willingham Best Political Theory Paper Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. In addition to this project, Brandon is also working on a thematic philosophical study of black nationalist thought in the United States tentatively titled, Sovereignty, Soulcraft, and Suffering and other research projects on the political thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil rights historiography.
His broader academic interests also include Black intellectual and political thought, contemporary political theory, 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, aesthetics, 19th and 20th century US history, American political development, the philosophy of race and racism, questions of poverty, crime, and incarceration in political and social theory, and the aesthetics and sociology of hip-hop and black youth culture. He has written or provided commentary for NPR, WGBH, The Huffington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Point, The Nation, Time, MTV News, and more.
Dr. Peniel Joseph and Virginia Cumberbatch, Director of UT’s Community Engagement Center, discuss race, equity, and community engagement at UT and across Austin.
Dr. Christen Smith researches engendered anti-Black state violence and Black community responses to it in Brazil and the Americas. Her work primarily focuses on transnational anti-Black police violence, Black liberation struggles, the paradox of Black citizenship in the Americas, and the dialectic between the enjoyment of Black culture and the killing of Black people. Her book, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil uses the lens of performance to examine the immediate and long-term impact of police violence on the Black population of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil and the grassroots movement to denounce and end this violence. Her more recent, comparative work examines the lingering, deadly impact of police violence on black women in Brazil and the U.S.
Dr. Daina Ramey Berry is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin. Her most recent book, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, traces the economic value assigned to enslaved people across their lifespans and has won multiple awards including the 2018 Hamilton Book Award.
Dr. Devin Walker earned his undergraduate degree in 2008 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he majored in Sociology and History. He earned his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Austin in 2018. His research portfolio focuses on the intersection of race, sports, and education with an emphasis on international education. His dissertation explored the influence that international education had on the personal, social and career development of Division 1 Black male student-athletes. Devin served as graduate student fellow with AAMRI from 2013-2018 where he helped institute novel programming such as College for a Day and The Black Manhood Series. Devin has extensive experience living, working, and backpacking abroad. He taught English in Korea for 2 years, has lived in 5 countries and has traveled to 30 countries. In 2017, he was awarded the Global Leadership Award from the Diversity Abroad Network for his work in creating equity and access within international education. Devin’s role as a post-doctoral fellow with DDCE is to direct the divisions of global leadership initiatives as well as, BOOST, an initiative designed to prepare students for the 21st century global workforce through innovative professional development programming. In his free time, Devin is the CEO and founder of The World Walker Foundation, a 501(c)(3) which provides educational and financial resources to help students of the African diaspora participate in service-learning trips within the African diaspora.
Eric Tang is an Associate Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department and faculty member in the Center for Asian American Studies. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Sociology and serves as a faculty fellow with both the Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis and the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. His first book, titled Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Temple University Press, 2015), is an ethnographic account of refugee life in some of New York City’s most impoverished and socially marginalized neighborhoods. A former community organizer, Tang has published several articles on race and urban social movements, including award-winning writing on post-Katrina New Orleans. He is at work on a second book, Fire In the Streets (Verso Books, 2018), which revisits the urban rebellions of the late-1960s. Locally, Tang’s research focuses on the past and present of racial segregation in Austin, Texas, paying particular attention the gentrification-driven displacements of the city’s longstanding African American residents. He co-authored the report “Outlier: The Case of Austin’s Declining African American population” which revealed that Austin was the only major growing city in the United States to experience an absolute numerical decline in African Americans.
Dr. Richard J. Reddick is an award-winning Associate Professor in Educational Leadership and Policy, where he serves as coordinator of the Program in Higher Education Leadership, with courtesy appointments in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, and the Warfield Center of African and African American Studies. Dr. Reddick is also the Assistant Director of the Plan II Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts, and serves as a faculty fellow in the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis, all at The University of Texas at Austin. Reddick is a Spring 2018 Visiting Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and serves as the faculty co-chair of the Institute for Educational Management (IEM) at Harvard. In 2016, he served on the steering committee and as Education Working Group co-chair of the Mayor's Task Force on Institutional Racism and Structural Inequity (IRSI) for the City of Austin.
His research focuses on several areas: the experiences of Black faculty and faculty of color at predominantly White institutions; mentoring and developmental relationships between faculty and Black students; and work-life balance in academia. Reddick's research has been published in the American Educational Research Journal (AERJ) and Harvard Educational Review (HER), featured on NPR, PBS, and the Associated Press, and he has contributed over 50 scholarly articles, chapters, and entries, including four co-authored and co-edited scholarly volumes. Dr. Reddick is also active in national research associations, most notably the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE).
Dr. Reddick holds a master's and doctorate in higher education from Harvard University, and a bachelor's from The University of Texas at Austin. He is married and the father of two children, serves on the boards of two public charter schools, and is actively engaged in organizations focused on improving the quality of life for citizens of color in Austin, Texas. A game show maven, Dr. Reddick is also a former Jeopardy! champion and Wheel of Fortune College Week champion.
In the inaugural episode of Race and Democracy, Dr. Peniel Joseph sits down with Dr. Leonard Moore to discuss race, voting rights, social movements, and American moral identity. They cover a broad range of topics including the spreading of racial hatred in the past two years, the loss of morality in American politics, reinvigorating the African American political class, Black Lives Matter, and the recent racially motivated killings of the past few years in America.
Moore is a native of Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his B.A. from Jackson State University in 1993 and his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1998. He was a history professor at Louisiana State University from 1998 to 2007, where he also directed the African and African American Studies Program and the Pre-Doctoral Scholar’s Institute.
At UT Austin, he serves as the George W. Littlefield Professor in American History and is also a Fellow of Lee and Joseph D. Jamail Chair in African American Studies.
He is the author of three books. His most recent book, “The Defeat of Black Power: Civil Rights and the National Black Political Convention of 1972,” was published in February. Moore currently serves as chair of the board of directors for the Austin Area Urban League.